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In this essay I shall explore the possibilities for knowledge of God that are opened up by recent developments in epistemology that go under the title externalism; more specifically, I shall be concerned with the version of externalism known as reliabilism. I shall set this up with a consideration of how those possibilities look from a more internalist epistemological stance. I shall be working from within the Christian tradition, though I take my remarks to have a wider bearing.

What is going on here? Has there been some revolutionary new find that seriously discredits Christianity? No, not at all. The truth is that the JS is an anachronism—a throwback to nineteenth-century quests for the historical Jesus, and not even representative of mainstream contemporary New Testament scholarship. 

What is the Jesus Seminar? 

The JS is the brainchild of well-known New Testament scholar and Greek grammarian, Robert Funk—for many years a professor at the University of Montana. Desiring to write a book on the historical Jesus as long ago as the 1970s, Funk wanted to incorporate reflections that represented a scholarly "consensus." He came up with the idea of assembling a team of scholars that would vote on each saying of Jesus to create a new kind of red-letter edition of the Gospels—with only those sayings that really go back to Jesus colored red. In time the idea evolved into four different colors, since historical assessments involve varying degrees of probability.

 As many as 200 scholars participated in the JS over the years, but the final group dwindled to 74. People dropped out for various reasons. Some expressed discomfort with how the most radical fringes of New Testament scholarship were disproportionately represented on the JS. Others voiced disagreement with Funk’s propagandistic purposes of popularizing scholarship in a way designed explicitly to undermine conservative Christian credibility.²

 The final "Fellows" of the JS, as they are called, fall roughly into three categories. Fourteen of them are among the leading names in the field, including a few who have published major works on the historical Jesus in recent years (e.g., John Dominic Crossan of DePaul University and Marcus Borg of Oregon State). Two of these 14 are sympathetic to many evangelical concerns: Bruce Chilton (of Bard College, New York) and Ramsey Michaels (of Southwest Missouri State).

Roughly another 20 are names recognizable to New Testament scholars who keep abreast of their field, even if they are not as widely published. These, too, include several who have written impor­tant recent works on the Jesus-tradition, particularly in regard to various non-canonical gospels (e.g., Marvin Meyer of Chapman University and Karen King of Occidental College).

The remaining 40—more than half of the JS—are relative unknowns; most have published at best two or three journal articles, while several are recent Ph.D.s whose dissertations were on some theme of the Gospels. A computer-search of the ATLA and OCLC databases of published books and articles³ turned up no entries relevant to New Testament studies whatsoever for a full 18 of the Fellows.

Overall, the Jesus Seminar is composed of Protestants, Catholics, and atheists, professors at universities and seminaries, one pastor, three members of the Westar Institute in California which sponsored the project, one filmmaker, and three others whose current occupations are entirely unidentified. Of the 74 there are three women and two Jews. Thirty-six, almost half, have a degree from or currently teach at one of three schools—Harvard, Claremont, or Vanderbilt—universities with some of the most liberal departments of New Testament studies anywhere. Only a handful come from outside North America; European scholarship is almost entirely unrepresented. Among the less well-known names are two or three additional evangelical sympathizers, but it is clear they were consistently outvoted by the "far left."

What did the Jesus Seminar Conclude?

The Five Gospels uses more black ink for the sayings of Jesus than red, pink, and gray put together. Only 15 sayings of Jesus are colored red—and then not always in all the different versions in which they appear in the various Gospel parallels. The red sayings are all short, pithy "aphorisms" (unconventional proverb-like sayings) such as, "turn the other cheek" (Matt. 5:39; Luke 6:29), "congratulations, you poor" (Luke 6:20; Thomas 54), and "love your enemies" (Luke 6:27; Matt. 5:44)⁴—or parables (particularly the more subversive ones) such as the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35), the Shrewd Manager (Luke l6:l-8a), and the Vineyard Laborers (Matt. 20:1-15). The only saying that appears in more than two Gospels that was colored red each time was, "Pay to the emperor what belongs to the emperor and God what belongs to God" (Matt. 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25; Thomas 100:2). This was also the only saying in the entire Gospel of Mark to be colored red.

Pink sayings are much more plentiful; an appendix lists 75. But again they are almost entirely limited to short, unconventional utterances such as one might expect from an Oriental sage or cryptic guru. Most of these come from sayings paralleled either in Matthew and Luke or in one of those Gospels plus Thomas. The gray sayings are not indexed but appear about twice as often as the pink. Indeed, the commentary explains that much of the gray matter came very close to being pink in the voting. At times over half of the Fellows voted red or pink, but the remaining black vote resulted in a gray "compromise." Somewhat more than half of all the teaching attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, however, remains black, including virtually everything in the Gospel of John.

Sometimes longer passages are subdivided into various colors. For example, in Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9-13), "Our Father" is red. "Your name be revered," "impose your imperial rule," "provide us with the bread we need for the day," and "forgive our debts to the extent that we have forgiven those in debt to us" are all pink. "And please don’t subject us to test after test" is gray, while "in the heavens," "enact your will on earth as you have in heaven," and "but rescue us from the evil one" are all black. In other instances, even though the commentary notes that the Fellows found one part of a passage much more likely to be authentic than another, the text is not subdivided but all colored pink (red plus gray) or gray (pink plus black)—for example, the parable of the wedding banquet (Matt. 22:1-14). No explanation is ever given for this inconsistency.

Evaluating the Jesus Seminar’s Work

The Golden Rule ("Treat people in ways you want them to treat you") gets only a gray coloring by the JS because it is potentially self-centered. The real Jesus, we are told, would more likely have said something like, "Treat people in the way they want to be treated." Unfortunately, the JS did not apply this more "noble" approach to the Jesus of the Gospels. But even by the logic of the more "inferior" version of Matthew 7:12, it seems reasonable to apply the same method of color-coding to the work of these Fellows that they used on the five Gospels.

We shall therefore organize our critique under three headings: (1) red or pink material—that is, where almost all scholars would agree that the JS is probably correct in their presuppositions, methods, and conclusions; (2) gray material—that is, where the JS’s approach reflects views widely held in nonevangelical scholarship but suspect nevertheless; and (3) black material—that is, where the JS is out of sync even with the majority of nonevangelical New Testament scholarship. The percentages of material that fall into each category correspond roughly to the percentages of the various colors of ink that the JS itself employed!

Red or Pink Matter: Where the Jesus Seminar Speaks for Most Scholars

No doubt at least 20 percent and perhaps a little more of what the JS concludes is legitimate. Evangelical scholars widely agree with critics of other persuasions that it is appropriate to employ historical methods in analyzing the Gospel traditions. Christianity is a religion that makes uniquely historical claims. If a majority of the canonical Gospels’ portraits of Jesus were unhistorical, the theological claims of our faith could not stand. The type of apologetics that requires belief as a presupposition for discussion fails to convince any but the already converted. So it is entirely appropriate to employ criteria of historical analysis that believers and unbelievers can share and see if the Bible can withstand such scrutiny.

In that light, we can agree with the JS and virtually all other modern scholars that the Gospels are a complex product of tradition and redaction. That is to say, the teachings of Jesus were not written down when He first spoke them but were passed along by word of mouth over a period of decades. In that process of oral tradition, they were paraphrased, abbreviated, combined together in small collections, applied to a wide variety of situations in the early church, and ultimately put in the form in which we now find them by the writers of the Gospels themselves. However, we believe that all of this took place under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, and through His inspiration the writers accurately reported exactly what He wanted them to represent of the life and teachings of Jesus.

These writers functioned as "redactors"—that is, editors—choosing which teachings of Jesus they wanted to include, in what order, and in keeping with the distinctive theological purposes they considered most crucial for the Christian communities to which they were writing. Mark was probably the first Gospel written. Matthew and Luke each drew on Mark as well as probably on "Q" (from the German Quelle, meaning "source")—a hypothesized document composed primarily of teachings of Jesus (which explains why Matthew and Luke have a lot of material in common not found in Mark, but almost always limited to Jesus’ sayings). John, however, wrote later and more independently, accounting for the greater differences between his Gospel and the previous three "synoptic" Gospels.

This process of oral tradition plus written editorial activity accounts for why virtually any saying of Jesus of any length that is found in more than one Gospel does not appear word-for-word in exactly the same form. So also does the fact that Jesus spoke in Aramaic but the Gospels were written in Greek. Literal translation from one language to another inevitably breaks down at numerous points. The ancient world, moreover, had no symbol for quotation marks and no conviction that a verbatim account of someone’s speech was any more or less valuable than an accurate paraphrase. Missing, too, was any concept that detached objectivity was somehow a virtue for writers of history (although there was a concern for reporting facts faithfully and accurately [Luke 1:1-4]). What point was there in telling the stories of the teachings and actions of great individuals if not to learn something from their examples?

So we need have no objection in principle to the idea that some of Jesus’ teachings are fairly literal translations of His actual words (red) and that others are more paraphrastic in nature (pink). We can even accept some of the JS’s reasons for coloring a saying gray, as, for example, when it believes that the words of a saying reflect a mixture of Jesus’ wording and the later Gospel writer’s favorite vocabulary, so long as the essence of the teaching is faithful to Jesus’ original intent. (In many instances, however, gray for the JS means that they find some part of a saying objectionable and not consistent with Jesus’ original speech.)

Gray Matter: Where the Jesus Seminar Speaks Mostly for Liberal Scholars

There are at least 10 important areas in which the JS adopts assumptions and perspectives that are widely held in nonevangelical scholarship but which need to be challenged. Those assumptions include: (1) The authors of the four canonical Gospels are not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as traditionally believed. (2) None of these four Gospels were written before the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. (3) The oral tradition of Jesus’ sayings was quite fluid. Simple teachings were often greatly expanded, embellished, and distorted in the process. (4) Various people in the early church, including the Gospel writers themselves, felt free to invent say–ings of Jesus that had little or no basis in what He actually taught. (5) If a saying can be demonstrated to promote later Christian causes, it could not have originated with Jesus. (6) The historicity of John’s gospel is extremely suspect. (7) Historical analysis cannot admit the supernatural as an explanation for an event. Therefore, Jesus’ words after His resurrection—like His earlier predictions about His death, resurrection, and return—cannot be authentic. (8) Jesus never explained His parables and aphorisms. All concluding words of explanation, especially allegorical interpretations of parables and metaphors, are thus inauthentic. (9) Jesus never directly declared who He was. All such "self-referential" material (in which Jesus says, "I am…" or, "I have come to…") is therefore also inauthentic. (10) The burden of proof rests on any particular scholar who would claim authenticity for a particular saying of Jesus and not on the skeptic.

Space obviously precludes a detailed response to each of these 10 claims. But we can at least sketch out the broad contours of a reply.

1. The external evidence (i.e., the testimony of the early church) uniformly attributes authorship of the first three Gospels to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is not likely that the church would have ascribed two of these three Gospels to men who were not among the original twelve apostles (Mark and Luke), and the other one to the notorious ex-tax-collector (Matthew), unless there was strong reason for believing them to be the original authors. Modern-day objections to these ancient traditions have all been adequately answered in a variety of published works.⁵
2. The same external evidence suggests that Matthew and Mark should be dated at least as early as the 60s. Internal evidence places Luke in that time frame as well, since his second volume, the Book of Acts, ends abruptly with Paul awaiting the outcome of his appeal to the emperor in Rome. The best explanation of that abrupt ending remains the assumption that Luke was writing while Paul was still in house-arrest and hence no later than AD. 62. Early Christian tradition, on the other hand, puts John’s gospel in the 90s but usually attributes it to John the apostle, one of Jesus’ closest followers, so that here we have reputable eyewitness testimony. In each case, the four Gospels were most probably written by people in a position to know and accurately preserve Jesus’ teaching—Matthew and John because they had personally accompanied Jesus; Luke because he had talked with eyewitnesses and engaged in careful historical research (Luke 1:1-4); and Mark (again according to the church fathers) because he had ministered together with Peter in Rome (cf. also 1 Pet. 5:13).⁶
3. Careful studies of ancient Jewish culture and surrounding nations demonstrate that oral traditions held sacred were preserved with remarkable care. The New Testament world was an oral culture, producing prodigious feats of memory. Rabbis at times had memorized the entire Scriptures (our Old Testament). Such abilities did not preclude the freedom to retell stories with all kinds of minor variation in detail so long as the point of each story or teaching was left intact. The alleged tendency of traditions to develop from simple to complex has been repeatedly refuted; if anything, there was a slight tendency to abbreviate more lengthy narratives.⁷
4. There is not a single piece of hard data demonstrating that early Christians felt free to create out of whole cloth sayings of Jesus which He never spoke. The most common way this assumption has been defended is by the idea of prophecy: New Testament prophets spoke in the name of the risen Lord and their words were allegedly later intermingled with those of the historical Jesus. But while such practices may have occurred with other gods or historical figures in nearby cultures, every reference to the words of Christian prophets inside and outside the New Testament canon makes it clear that they were not confused with the words of the earthly Jesus.⁸
5. Although it is widely believed that theological motives impugn historicity, such a belief rests on a patently false dichotomy. As already noted, ancient history was not written according to today’s standards of scholarly detachment. If sayings of Jesus relevant to the later church must be discounted, then so must the words of the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, and the Jewish historian Josephus, when they help to promote Roman or Jewish causes. In such cases, we would be left with almost total agnosticism about ancient history, a conclusion few scholars are prepared to promote. The fallacy of course, is to imagine that telling a story for a purpose, even in service of a cause one believes in passionately, necessarily forces one to distort history. In our modern era, some of the most reliable reporters of the Nazi Holocaust were Jews passionately committed to seeing such genocide never repeated. In this case, it is the appalling later revisionism of those who claimed the Holocaust never happened that has distorted history, not the testimony of those passionately caught up in the events of the time.⁹
6. John is quite different than the Synoptics, but that does not make him any less historical. Precisely because he is largely independent of them, he has chosen to focus on different aspects of Jesus’ teaching and career. Interestingly, John actually has more references to time and place—including details about first-century Palestine that have been strikingly corroborated by archeology—than do the Synoptics. I have elsewhere written in greater detail about the differ–ences among the four Gospels (and the more general question of the historical reliability of the Gospels) and I refer the reader to that more extensive discussion.¹⁰
7. Antisupernaturalism is historically reductionistic (i.e., overly limiting what may have actually happened) and philosophically untenable. The historian may not personally be convinced by the testimony of Jesus’ disciples that they saw Him alive again after His death. But that gives him or her no right to color all sayings of the resurrected Jesus black (i.e., in Matthew 28, Luke 24, and John 20-21). This the JS did on the highly debatable grounds that "words ascribed to Jesus after his death are not subject to historical verification." Since numerous credible eyewitnesses reported seeing and hearing Jesus on several occasions, historical verification is not really the problem. The problem rather is that no evidence for a resurrection will be satisfactory if one has concluded a priori that miracles cannot happen. But such a position is not based in historical research but rather in philosophical bias. Thus it provides no good basis for rejecting the words of the resurrected Christ.
8. Almost all rabbinic parables (of which over 2,000 have been preserved) have some kind of allegorical explanation. It is hard to believe, therefore, that Jesus the Jew did not give some kind of indication as to what His more pithy and contro­versial teachings meant. Indeed, the whole parable-allegory dichotomy is another false one, and again I must refer the reader to my book-length discussion of the matter for further detail.¹¹
9. It is inherently improbable that Jesus (or any other sage) would never talk about Himself in the first person. The real reason behind this claim is that many modern scholars are reluctant to believe that Jesus made the specific claims for Himself which the Gospels say He did. Often this is because they would then have to come to grips with His claims upon their lives—demands that they are not prepared to accept (e.g., "I am the way, and I am truth, and I am life….No one gets to the Father unless it is through me"—John 14:6).¹²
10. Applying the "believer’s burden of proof’ criterion to historical inquiry in general would leave us with virtually no secure knowledge of anything in the ancient world. It is flatly contrary to the approach of ancient historians more generally, who assume that if writers prove trustworthy where they can be tested, they are given the benefit of the doubt where they cannot be tested. Repeatedly the Gospel writers have proved themselves reliable in this respect, so the burden of proof should fall squarely on the skeptics’ shoulders.

Black Matter: Where the Jesus Seminar Speaks for Few Scholars

Perhaps the most striking feature of The Five Gospels is how out of touch it is even with mainline scholarship. In fact, a major movement among New Testament critics has generated what has been dubbed "the third quest" for the historical Jesus. This quest has been far more optimistic than its predecessors in claiming that substantial amounts of material about what Jesus said and did can be recovered from the canonical Gospels. Indeed, two of the major contributors to this quest—James Charlesworth of Princeton and E. P. Sanders of Duke—agree that "the dominant view today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said, and that those two things make sense within the world of first-century Judaism."¹³

It is this final clause that the JS virtually ignores. Their Jesus does not make sense in the world of Judaism. Indeed, every time Jesus looks too much like other Jewish teachers of His day, His words are discounted as inauthentic for that very reason. The JS’s Jesus resembles a Greco-Roman philosopher, a cynic sage; an itinerant speaker who never refers to Scripture, who never speaks more than one short parable on any occasion, who engages in no extended dialogues or controversies with the religious leaders of His world.

The one historical fact that almost everybody agrees on—that Jesus was crucified—finds no adequate explanation in the Jesus that is left after the JS excises 80 percent of His teachings. As leading Catholic scholar John Meier puts it in his much more representative, recent work on the historical Jesus, "A tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field—such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one."¹⁴

On the other hand, the JS is far more optimistic than most scholars about the possibility of unearthing reliable, independent, presynoptic traditions in the Gospel of Thomas. Their dating of Thomas to about A.D. 50 is at least one century earlier than anything the external evidence (or the majority of scholars) supports. This noncanonical, apocryphal document is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. About one-third of them are clearly Gnostic in nature; about one-third are quite similar to short aphorisms and parables of Jesus in the canonical Gospels; and about one-third contain otherwise unknown teachings ascribed to Jesus that are not demonstrably unorthodox but which could lend themselves to Gnostic interpretations.

Many scholars have often wondered if a few sayings of Jesus in Thomas might reflect independent, authentic traditions not previously known. But most scholars believe a majority of the sayings reflect a later stage of the tradition, when a concern for special wisdom and elitist knowledge outstripped the concerns of the original Jesus.¹⁵

The JS implausibly inverts this sequence. Instead of an apocalyptic Jesus teaching about a future kingdom that is now at hand—heralding the arrival of a messianic age and fulfilling the hopes of the children of Israel, as twentieth-century scholarship has predominantly stressed—the Fellows’ Jesus speaks only of a present, timeless kingdom and merely offers wise advice about how to live at peace in a hostile world. Any hint of apocalyptic is assigned to a secondary stage of the tradition.

 This Jesus is more Gnostic—concerned primarily to impart true knowledge—than anything orthodox Christianity has ever accepted. Today we might call it "New Age." But given the JS’s stated goal of discrediting orthodox Christianity and going beyond mainstream scholarship (despite their repeated claims that they represent a consensus), this conclusion should not be surprising.¹⁶

 There are numerous other ways in which the JS is idiosyncratic even among nonevangelical scholars. We have room merely to list ten of them here; the implausibility of most of the following positions should be obvious. (1) The JS’s methodology is highly reductionistic: no teaching that cannot be separated from the narrative in which it is embedded (i.e., which could not have circulated by itself in the oral tradition) can be authentic. (2) No teaching that is neither a parable nor an aphorism can be authentic. (3) Anything with parallels in the "common lore" of the day is suspect; somebody else probably falsely attributed it to Jesus. (4) Jesus said nothing, however implicitly, to suggest a messianic consciousness (not even a merely human messianic consciousness). (5) Hence, Jesus never used the title "Son of man," even though this passes all other criteria of authenticity with flying colors as the most distinctive and characteristic way in which Jesus spoke about Himself. (6) Almost all of the passion narrative sayings are colored black, since Jesus spoke nothing about His death or its significance. (7) Jesus never taught anything about final judgment or threatened people with God’s wrath. (8) He never debated with anybody, never preached sermons, never compared His teaching with what was found in the Law. (9) Our current Gospels are relatively arbitrary in the order in which they arrange Jesus’ teachings. (10) Nevertheless, other historical sources from antiquity are quoted (e.g., Josephus on Jesus son of Ananias and on Eleazar the exorcist) as if they can be trusted implicitly. And in one place, based on no allegedly historical information of any kind—inside or outside the canon—the Fellows "regard it as probable that [Jesus] had a special relationship with at least one woman, Mary of Magdala," so that they doubt Jesus was celibate!’¹⁷

The False Claims of Consensus

The JS claims to represent a consensus of "critical" scholars — that is, scholars whose conclusions are not already predetermined by religious confessions. In claiming such a consensus they are highly misleading. Adela Yarbro Collins, a leading New Testament scholar at the University of Chicago, wryly noted in a recent meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature that at some of the proceedings of the JS, two of its leaders would get together and, whenever they would agree on an opinion, they would announce to the rest: "There is a consensus among scholars…"! 

We have noted above numerous ways in which the JS reflects the "radical fringe" of critical scholarship and generally does not include the most established scholars of a more moderate perspective. Once it is admitted that evangelical scholars can also be "critical" and not allow their beliefs to predetermine their historical conclusions (an admission the JS is unwilling to make), it becomes clear that the JS’s claims to represent consensus views on more than a small percentage of the issues they address are simply false.

Endnotes

1. Ed. Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover.

2 See Robert W, Funk and Mahlon H. Smith, The Gospel of Mark: Red-Letter Edition (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1991), xvi-xvii.

3 The January 1993 CD-ROM of the American Theological Library Association indexes all articles in journals or multi-author works listed in Religion Index One and Two, a standard index of articles in the field. The On-Line Computer Library Center (OCLC) is the comprehensive database of books available for interlibrary loan in North America, including all major theological libraries.

4 All translations of gospel portions come from the JS’s "Scholars’ Version," not least to give the reader a feel for the nature of that translation.

5 Conveniently summarized, e.g., in the relevant sec­tions of textbooks such as D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo, and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).

6 See Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 599-622; idem, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 1026-45; Cohn J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (T?ɬ�bingen: Mohr, 1989), 308-410; Leon Morris, Studies in the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 45-92.

7 By far the most important study of these features of the oral tradition is Rainer Riesner, Jesus als Lehrer (T?ɬ�bingen: Mohr, 1981), unfortunately never translated into English. See his "Jesus as Preacher and Teacher," in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, ed. Henry Wansbrough (Sheffield: JSOT, 1991), 185-216. See also Kenneth E. Bailey, "Informal Controlled Oral Tradition," Asia Journal of Theology 5 (1991), 34-54; and Leslie R. Keylock, "Bultmann’s Law of Increasing Distinctness," in Current Issues in Biblical and Patristic Interpretation, ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 193-210.

8 See David Hill, New Testament Prophecy (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1979); and David E. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983).

9 One of the best discussions of how a gospel can be both history and theology remains I. Howard Marshall, Luke: Historian and Theologian (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970, rev. 1989).

10 Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987).

11 Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990).

12 Cf., e.g., the candid admissions of Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco: HarpeCollins, 1993), 245-58. Mack was not one of the final Fellows of the JS but his writing closely reflects their distinctive approach to Jesus.

13 E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985), 2; quoted by James H. Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 205.

14 John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 177.

15 The two most detailed studies defending this conclusion are both in German: Wolfgang Schrage, Dos Verh?ɬ�ltnis des Thomas-Evangeliums zur synoptischen Tradition und zu den koptischen Evangelien?ɬ�bersetzungen (Berlin: T?ɬ?pelmann, 1964); and Michael Fieger, Das Thomasevangelium: Einleitung, Kommentar und Systematik (Münster: Aschendorff, 1991). More briefly, but in English, cf. Christopher M. Tuckett, "Thomas and the Synoptics," Novum Testamentum 30(1988), 132-57; and Meier, 123-39.

16 Funk’s agenda becomes obvious when he expresses disappointment that the JS colored only a handful of unparalleled sayings in Thomas pink. He is obviously not wanting to reflect an existing consensus but to move beyond it to bold, new historical judgments. See especially Five Gospels, 524-25.

17 Ibid., 221.

Among other things, scientists try to solve both empirical and conceptual problems. Conceptual problems, in turn, are of two basic types: internal and external. In this article, I offer a taxonomy of both types of conceptual problems that have constituted scientific practice throughout its history and argue that certain activities done by creationists fit this taxonomy nicely. I then conclude that these creationist activities cannot be faulted as being non-science or pseudo-science once we see how they fit a proper scientific pattern of addressing conceptual problems in other areas.

The history of the interaction between theology and science is a complicated affair, and it is generally recognized today that a warfare metaphor is inadequate to capture the multifaceted nature of this interaction. Nevertheless, skirmishes have been present from time to time, and in recent years we have witnessed an intense controversy over the scientific status of scientific creationism, alternatively called creation science. A number of advocates of complementarity approaches to the integration of science and theology have frowned on these skirmishes because, in their view, they represent an inadequate understanding of the nature of both science and religion.

It seems to be widely agreed by complementarity advocates and others that "creation science" is a term which resembles the term "jumbo shrimp"— it is a contradiction precisely because creation science is not science, but religion or theology masquerading as science. Thus, Robert C. Cowen, the natural science editor for the Christian Science Monitor, says this:

It is this many-faceted on-going science story [the theory of evolution] that should be told in public school biology courses. Creationists want those courses to include the possibility of—and "scientific” evidence for—a creator as well. There is no such "scientific" evidence. The concept of a supernatural creator is inherently religious. It has no place in a science class.¹

Such claims are not limited to the popular media, but appear in scholarly circles as well. Michael Ruse claims that even if scientific creationism were totally successful in making its case as science, it would not yield a scientific explanation of origins. Rather, at most, it could prove that science shows that there can be no scientific explanation of origins.²

Elsewhere, Ruse states that "the creationists believe the world started miraculously. But miracles lie outside of science, which by definition deals with the natural, the repeatable, that which is governed by law."³

This view of science and theology, especially of creation science, is also widely held among evangelical scholars. John Weister asserts: "Science does not have the answers to all the world’s questions. The question of ultimate origins is an unsolved problem that transcends science. There are no data we can gather. It leads to questions of philosophy and religion, which do not fall within science’s domain."⁴ In a similar vein, Paul de Vries and Howard J. Van Till have stated that science requires the adoption of methodological naturalism in such a way that broad questions of philosophy like ethics, ultimate origins’ and abstract metaphysical speculation, as well as theological concepts like "God" or a "direct, miraculous act of God" are outside the bounds of science properly understood.⁵

Statements like these could be multiplied, and it should be obvious that they are not first-order scientific assertions that merely state that, although the hypotheses formulated by creation scientists are scientific, they have not been adequately confirmed by scientific observations and experiments, or they do not embody other epistemic virtues (e.g. simplicity, novel predictions) that a good scientific hypothesis ought to exemplify. These statements make a far deeper claim. They assert a second-order philosophical view about science, namely, that creation science is not a science at all, but something else. Thus, my assessment of the merits of these statements will draw heavily from insights in the philosophy and the history of science.

My intention here is not merely to raise another round of controversy about creation and evolution. Rather, I would argue that the nature of creation science provides an occasion for examining the much broader and more far-reaching issue of whether and how our Christian theism should affect our view of the world. As Thomas Morris has pointed out, for some time now there has been an attitude of theological anti-realism among many theologians. They believe that it is intellectually futile to bring their Christian theism to bear on questions of the nature, origin, investigation, and development of the world.⁶

In science, this theological anti-realism has manifested itself in the view that science and theology are non-interacting, non-competing disciplines. They are perceived as either being complementary to each other, and focusing on different realms of reality, or else as in being conflict with each other, and asking and answering very different kinds of questions.

This attitude expresses itself in the conviction that creation science is not a science. There are a number of reasons for this conviction, but, as we have seen, chief among them is the idea that broad philosophical and theological issues are outside of the realm of science. Creation science is a mistake, science must adopt methodological naturalism, and the theological concept of a miraculous act of God is not something that should be allowed to enter into the practice of scientific theory formation, explanation, or testing.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I want to catalog and illustrate the role that conceptual problems have played and should play in the practice of science. Regardless of the debate about the scientific status of creation science, this discussion is valuable as a corrective to the singular preoccupation with empirical problems that seems to prevail in much current discussion about science. Secondly, and more importantly, I want to make one step in an argument to the effect that creation science is a science and not a religion (a second-order issue in the philosophy of science). I will do this by examining the untenable but popular claim cited above, that creation scientists’ utilization of theological, ethical, and philosophical concepts are somehow irrelevant and inappropriate to the practice of science. In the process, I hope to show precisely how conceptual problems have entered into the controversy over creation and evolution. We will see that the mere presence of broad philosophical or theological ideas is not sufficient to signal the presence of non-science or pseudo-science.

It is crucial to keep in mind what I am and am not attempting to accomplish in this article. First, I make no first-order scientific claim that any particular creationist model, e.g. young earth creationism, is scientifically adequate. Thus, arguments to the effect that young earth creationism has been falsified or that creationism taken as a research program has not proven fruitful are beside the point. My concern is whether or not some form of creationism should be regarded as science in the first place, instead of religion masquerading as science.

Second, I am not attempting to defend the scientific status of creationism against every criticism in sight, nor am I trying to build a positive picture of what some fully developed creationist model would look like. Rather, I am trying to show that once we look at how internal and external conceptual problems have properly entered into the practice of science throughout its history, we have a precedent for thinking that when advocates of some version of creationism appeal to theological, philosophical, or ethical concepts as part of their intellectual practices, they have not necessarily stopped doing science and started doing something else. Instead, such utilizations of theological, philosophical, and ethical propositions by creationists fit a clearly defined typology that has been part of science for some time. Only someone out of touch with the nature and importance of conceptual problems for science could think otherwise.

In my view, this "methodological naturalist" understanding of science and religion is a mistake. One source of this mistake is a preoccupation with the more empirical aspects of science and a concomitant failure to appreciate the role that conceptual problems have played throughout the history of science.

There are two broad strategies we could take regarding the scientific status of creation science. The first is negative. We could argue that there is no adequate line of demarcation between science and nonscience/pseudoscience, no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as scientific. Therefore, we cannot state principles that rule out creation science. Given the fact that creationist theories were regarded as scientific by a significant number of scientists and philosophers of science until this century, we could argue that the burden of proof is on anyone who wishes to change the way creation science is classified, and this burden of proof has not been met.⁷

Now, I think it is generally acknowledged that no line of demarcation has been, or perhaps, can be, formulated. For this reason, philosophers of science as diverse as realist Ernan McMullin and antirealist Larry Laudan have agreed that creation science cannot be judged unscientific in this sense.⁸

Contrary to thinkers like Ruse, I agree with McMullin and Laudan in holding that this negative argument is correct. But the issue need not be left here, for there is a second, more positive line of defense for the claim that creation science is a science. This approach tries to show that creation science’s appeals to philosophical or theological ideas can be, and often have been, part of the practice of science itself, and thus are not irrelevant and inappropriate. This strategy will be the focus of the arguments that follow. I will begin by offering a characterization of creation science, and then will examine the nature and role of conceptual problems and how they shed light on the scientific status of creation science.

As a working definition of creation science, let us use the one expressed in the famous creation science trial (McLean v. Arkansas) in Little Rock, Arkansas in December of 1981.

Creation-science means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences. Creation-science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate: (1) Sudden creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing; (2) The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about the development of all living kinds from a single organism; (3) Changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals; (4) Separate ancestry for man and apes; (5) Explanation of the earth’s geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood, and (6) A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.⁹

While this characterization of creation science will do for our purposes, one thing should be pointed out. The essence of creation science theories is not located in points (5) and (6) above. Progressive creationists do not think that a universal flood (and catastrophism in general) can adequately explain the earth’s geology Further, progressive creationists favor the generally accepted dating of the Big Bang, the origin of the solar system and earth, and of life on earth.

But progressive creationists still hold to creationist theories because they, like their "young earth" creationist counterparts, deny the adequacy of theistic evolution and hold that a personal agent of great power and intelligence has intervened in the actual history of the cosmos through primary, agent causation (e.g the origin of the universe, first life, and basic, "kinds" of living things, including man).¹⁰ Further, they believe that this position is rationally defensible.¹¹

It is best to see progressive creationism and/or young earth creation-science as ways of specifying creationism as a research program. Such a research program recognizes the legitimacy of allowing theological propositions to aid us in formulating, testing, and evaluating scientific theories, in explaining scientific data, and solving various problems relevant to science.

The Nature of Conceptual Problems

Larry Laudan has given a great deal of attention to analyzing the nature and role of conceptual problems in the history of science, perhaps more than any other philosopher of science.¹² According to Laudan, science involves analyzing, clarifying, and solving empirical and conceptual problems. Empirical problems are first-order problems about objects in some domain (e.g. chemical phenomena in acid/base reactions) and are, in general, anything about the observable world that strikes us as odd and in need of explanation. They come in three major types: unsolved problems (those not adequately solved by any theory), solved problems (those that rival theories have solved, perhaps in different ways), and anomalous problems (those a particular theory has not solved, but at least one rival has solved).

Conceptual problems are also part of the practice of science. These come in two basic types. First, internal conceptual problems arise when the concepts within a theory appear to be logically inconsistent’ vague and unclear, or circularly defined, when the definition of some phenomenon in a scientific theory is hard to harmonize with an ordinary language or philosophical definition of that phenomenon, or when the concepts in a theory seem to classify some phenomenon in a problematic way. Second, external conceptual problems arise for a scientific theory, T, when T conflicts with some doctrine of another theory, T’, originating in some discipline outside of science, when T’ and its doctrines are well founded rationally, regardless of what discipline T’ is associated with. T may be logically inconsistent with T’ or the two may conflict in a lesser way by being jointly implausible (though still logically consistent)—that is, by being merely compatible, but not mutually reinforcing and explanatory.

No useful generalizations can be made about the epistemic impact of a conceptual problem on a particular scientific theory. In rare cases, the problem may count decisively against the theory. More likely, the problem will simply tend to count against the theory to a greater or lesser degree. Only a case-by-case analysis can we, at least in principle, determine how a particular conceptual problem should be weighed in assessing the rationality of accepting, withholding, or abandoning a particular scientific theory.

There are several different kinds of internal and external conceptual problems. The following discussion is a classification and illustration of some of the different kinds of conceptual problems which, as we shall see later, figure into the creation science controversy. It is important to keep in mind that the illustrations to follow are just that—illustrations. I am not presenting a defense of them as considerations that won the day; in fact, I do not always agree with the point being made by the examples, and I am not offering a full-blown characterization of these cases. My point is merely to illustrate the types of conceptual problems which have entered into the very fabric of science throughout its history.

Before we examine types of conceptual problems, one final point should be made. It may be the case that solving empirical and conceptual problems constitutes science, regardless of whether problem solving is understood in a realist or anti-realist way. I am inclined to believe that this is so. But this is a strong thesis, and I do not need it to make my case. For it may be that science is a set of practices, goals, values, methods, and so forth that merely bear family resemblances to one another. In this case, if it can be shown that solving internal and external conceptual problems has been and is an appropriate part of scientific practice, then the utilization of such problems by advocates of creation science does not by itself signal something irrelevant and inappropriate.

The taxonomy which follows is an attempt to show that creation scientists have raised certain conceptual problems which they believe to be anomalous for evolutionary theories and not for creationist theories, and that the types of conceptual problems utilized are consistent with those present throughout the history of science. It may be that evolutionary theories solve these problems and it may be that creationist theories do not. That discussion is beyond the scope of this article’s present concern. Instead, I will focus on the epistemically prior issue of the legitimacy of such conceptual problems in the first place.

Types of Internal Conceptual Problems

1. The concepts of a theory appear to be contradictory, circularly defined, vague, or unclear. An example of this would be the wave/particle nature of electromagnetic radiation and the wave nature of matter. Some have argued that these concepts appear to be self-contradictory or vague, and attempts have been made to clarify them or to show different ways to understand them.

Another example is the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson near the end of the nineteenth century. At that time there was a debate between German and British scientists over the nature of electricity, the former favoring an aether wave view and the latter favoring a particle picture. Earlier in the century, Michael Faraday had conducted various electrolysis experiments—experiments in which electric currents are passed through a water solution of decomposable compounds. He had shown that the amount of product liberated by such experiments is proportional to the amount of electricity introduced into solution, and that the same amount of electricity liberates masses of products proportional to chemically equivalent weights. The point here is not merely that these data tended to falsify the aether wave view. (This would be an empirical problem.) Rather, these data raised internal conceptual problems for aether wave theories because those theories had no clear way to picture or represent the causal mechanisms responsible for those data. Faraday and others of his day had no clear way to understand these results because of conceptual problems resulting from tying the results to their metaphysical picture of electricity as a continuous field or wave. Thomson offered conceptual clarity by changing the conceptual apparatus of electron theory from a wave theory to a particle theory.

2. Internal conceptual problems that arise in attempts to elucidate the relationship between a scientific definition of a term and a philosophical or ordinary language definition of that term create conflicts. As an example of this type of conceptual problem, consider the use of operational definitions in scientific theories. Once such a definition is formulated, it is not always clear how to take it. Should the ordinary language term be reduced to the _operational definition? Should the operational definition be taken as the main test for the presence of what is designated by the ordinary language term? Should the operational definition be seen as the empirical and/or quantifiable content of the ordinary language definition?

For example, when a psychologist defines "depression," "intelligence," or the "normal, functional family," these are often defined in operational terms, perhaps by reference to a standard test of some sort. Conceptual problems arise in trying to understand precisely what these terms really mean and how they should be related to philosophical or ordinary language counterparts.

3. Internal conceptual problems which arise when assessing the categorical aspects of scientific claims. Usually, scientific theories treat a particular phenomenon as an example of a certain category of thing. For example, heat used to be treated as an example of the category of substance. Later, heat was placed in the category of quality, and later still, in the category of quantity. The idea of color has undergone a similar categorical shift. One of the things which is closely related to categorical classification is the nature of identity. Different identity conditions are associated with alternative categorical classifications: "compositional stuff," "functional stuff a a quality-thing," a "quantity-thing a . Thus, philosophical clarity is needed to bring out identity conditions and other metaphysical aspects involved in the categorical classifications explicitly or implicitly involved in scientific theories.

In addition to internal conceptual problems, there are external conceptual problems which arise in conjunction with scientific theories. There are three main types of external conceptual problems.

Types of External Conceptual Problems

1. External conceptual problems which are logically inconsistent with a particular scientific theory. Two examples adequately illustrate this type of external conceptual problem. The first involves action at a distance. As is well known, most Newtonians postulated two kinds of forces: the force of impact and gravitational force which operates at a distance. From the time of Descartes to the present, arguments have been raised against the idea of a force defined as action at a distance. They include: (1) reality is a plenum and forces between two bodies are to be understood in terms of efficient, mechanical causes resulting from the impact of particles intervening between the two bodies in question; (2) our best philosophical understanding of causation requires the contiguity of cause and effect in space and time; and (3) a theory with one type of force is simpler than a theory with two types of forces.

A second example comes from the late J. L. Mackie.¹³ Mackie raised philosophical arguments against the special relativity idea that there is no such thing as an absolute reference frame for absolute rest and motion. If Mackie is correct, then there is such a thing as absolute space, contrary to what the special theory of relativity asserts.

2. External conceptual problems may arise for a scientific theory y that theory is taken to be the whole story about some phenomenon and such a posture undercuts one of the necessary preconditions for a scientific realist construal of that theory. Roughly, scientific realism is the view that science progresses towards truer and truer theories about the theory-independent world and that science does so in a rationally justifiable way. A number of philosophers of science have listed what they take to be necessary preconditions for a realist understanding of science, e.g. the existence and knowability of a theory-independent world, the ability of language to refer to that world, the laws of logic, and so forth.

Now, if a scientific theory undercuts one of the necessary preconditions of science itself, then that theory would be guilty of self-referential inconsistency. For example, Keith Lehrer has argued that certain varieties of physicalism regarding the mind/body problem are self-refuting.¹⁴ Thus, if various physicalist theories of mind are offered in a reductive way as the whole show, as it were, then Lehrer and other have argued that these theories make normative, non-natural rationality impossible. Thus, they make science itself impossible, including physicalist theories of mind.

3. External conceptual problems may arise when some scientific theory T, while strictly consistent with some theory in a discipline outside science, T’, still tends to count against T’. An example of this could be the use of teleological explanations which treat living organisms as goal-directed systems. It has been widely argued that evolutionary theory tends to count against the use of such explanations and, more otologically, against the presence of entelechies in organisms, even though the two are not mutually incompatible.

Perhaps I have now said enough about the nature of conceptual problems to give an idea of how they have figured into the practice of science. It is important to keep in mind the fact that conceptual problems arise in a field like logic, metaphysics, ethics, theology, and many other branches of study. But here we find that after they have surfaced, they become part of the very fabric of science itself. Why? Because part of scientific practice is the confirmation of scientific laws and theories, and confirmation involves assessing the rationality of accepting a given theory in light of all of the relevant evidence. Part of the relevant evidence is the way the theory solves the internal and external conceptual problems associated with it and its rivals. After all, it is no accident that philosophers are advancing models of evolutionary ethics and epistemology. These are attempts to work out an evolutionary research program and they illustrate the fact that science is not intellectually isolated from other cognitive concerns.

Conceptual Problems and Creation Science

Creation science cannot be adequately understood without examining it in light of the role conceptual problems play in creationist positions. The following are some illustrations of the kinds of internal and external conceptual problems associated with creation science’s criticisms of evolutionary theory, , which are claimed to support creationism. Creationists argue that these problems present difficulties for evolutionary theory but are not problems for creationism. Again, the point here is not to develop the illustrations, or even to argue that they are individually or collectively decisive, but simply to show that conceptual problems are problems which creation science and evolutionary theory must solve, and they are aspects of the confirmation of creation science and the disconfirmation of evolutionary theory. Therefore, conceptual problems play the same role in the creation/evolution debate that they have in theory adjudication in other areas of science throughout its history.

Internal Conceptual Problems

Type One. The first type of internal conceptual problem mentioned above has involved problems with a theory’s actual concepts. There are several examples of this type of conceptual problem involved in assessing evolutionary theory. First, problems have arisen with certain understandings of the mechanism of evolutionary development which utilize the idea of "survival of the fittest." Some scientists have claimed that evolution promotes the survival of the fittest, but when asked what the ~fittest" were, the answer was that the "fittest" were those which survived. But this seems to imply a problem of circularity with at least one aspect within evolutionary theory, and attempts have been made to redefine the goal of evolution (e.g., the selection of those organisms that are reproductively favorable) and the idea of fitness to avoid circularity.

The point here is not that the problem has not been solved or even that it was ever sufficient by itself to justify abandonment of evolutionary theory. Rather, the point is that when an objection of this type was raised it was not an example of an empirical problem with evolutionary theory (as would be problems with gaps in the fossil record), but rather it was a type of internal conceptual problem.

Michael Denton has argued that in order to justify an evolutionary transition from A to B which involved intermediate forms, one must discover intermediates which bridge that transition or construct plausible hypothetical pathways for that transiffon.¹⁵ Denton, argues, however, that many of these transitions are so problematic, e.g. that between a reptilian scale and an avian feather, that conceptual problems of vagueness and unclarity arise for any hypothetical pathway. Again, the point is not the first-order issue of whether or not Denton’s objection has adequate rejoinders. Rather, the point is that this type of criticism is an example of an internal conceptual problem.

Roughly this same type of argument has been raised against origin of life experiments. Bradley, Thaxton, and Olsen have claimed that prebiotic soup experiments involve illegitimate investigator interference at crucial times in order to guide natural processes down specific nonrandom pathways.¹⁶ In the absence of such interference, they claim that no conceivable mechanism could have accomplished the right effect.

One final example should suffice here. Creationists claim that the universe had a beginning through the production of the first event by means of agent causation. Stephen Hawking has claimed that many people find the idea of a first event objectionable because it "smacks of divine intervenffon.”¹⁷ Hawking’s own view involves the proposal that space and time might form a closed surface without a boundary. William Lane Craig has argued that Hawking’s model involves serious internal conceptual problems, e.g. a World Ensemble ontology (our world is a fluctuation of super-space in which all physically possible worlds are embedded), a B series view of time, and the replacement of real time with imaginary time (the square root of -1 is used as a coordinate of the time dimension)."¹⁸

Type Two. This type of internal conceptual problem involves relating a scientific definition to an ordinary language or philosophical definition. The following two examples illustrate how this type of problem has entered into creation/evolution discussions. First, questions have been raised about the use of "information" in DNA and in ordinary language. It has been argued that if information is given a scientific definition,, say as specified complexity, configurational entropy, or the number of instructions required to specify the structure in question, then DNA bears a very close analogy to human language. Some claim that since the latter signals the presence of meaning (e.g. propositions, concepts), and since meaning comes from intelligent minds, then information in DNA signals the presence of a Mind behind it.¹⁹

Consider a second example. E. Mayr has claimed that evolutionary theory is incompatible with the essentialism of thinkers like Aristotle and Plato (roughly the view that a class of organisms will be constituted by an essence or nature possessed by all and only members of that class).²⁰ Evolutionary definitions of taxonomic concepts, e.g. Homo sapiens, regard essences or types as unreal abstractions, and only individual and variable members of populations are real. Philosophers who embrace the existence of essences and real natural kinds could argue as follows. If evolutionary theory in general, and definitions of species in particular, tend to make essentialism unreasonable, then if there are good reasons to be an essentialist regarding living organisms, these reasons tend to count against evolutionary theory. This type of objection is raised by clarifying a scientific definition of a species and relating it to a philosophical essentialist definition.

Type Three. The third type of internal conceptual problem mentioned above involves assessing the categorical aspects of scientific claims. The following example illustrates the tendency in evolutionary theory to classify organisms as property things (structured stuff, or wholes, where the parts are "prior to" their wholes). Richard J. Connell has argued that scientific explanation tends to emphasize efficient and material causes, be physicalistic, reductionistic, and mechanistic in its orientation to macro-objects (e.g. living organisms), and thus, treats them like property-things or aggregates (roughly the view that organisms are structured stuffs with emergent properties, whose parts are prior to those organisms taken as wholes, and for which a machine metaphor is an adequate explanatory model).²¹

Paul Churchland and D. M. Armstrong have argued that evolutionary theory is incompatible with any form of dualism, especially substance dualism.²² If they are right, then organisms are property-things. Now, if someone thinks there are good grounds for classifying organisms as substance-things (deep unities where the wholes are "prior to" their parts), then it would constitute an internal conceptual problem for evolutionary theory, raised by analyzing the categorical classification of organisms most compatible with that theory.²³

External Conceptual Problems

Type One. This type of problem involves an intellectual idea initially raised in a domain outside of science which, if rational or true, would be logically inconsistent with evolutionary theory. Two examples will serve to illustrate this type of problem.

If evolutionary theory is extended, as it often is, to include issues involved in the origin of the universe, then the following issue arises. Philosophical arguments can be given which show that it is reasonable to claim that the universe began a finite time ago as a result of agent causation. Support for the beginning of the universe involves, among other things, presenting philosophical problems with the existence and/or traversability of an actual infinite, both of which would be involved in coming to the present moment from a beginningless universe. Support for the agent causation view involves, among other things, showing state-state causation to be inadequate to generate a first event from a timeless, immutable state of affairs otologically prior to the first event.²⁴ These arguments have been offered as support of creationist ideas of creation and against certain evolutionary models of the universe.

The second example is very important. Suppose someone held to the following two propositions:

1. The Bible is the Word of God and it teaches the truth on all matters of which it speaks.
2. The Bible, properly interpreted, teaches (among other things) certain truths that run counter to evolutionary theory and which are consistent with creationist theories

Suppose further that this person had a list of good, rational arguments for these two propositions. In support of (1), he or she lists arguments from prophecy, history, archaeology, and other areas of science for the contention that the Bible is a divinely inspired book and it is rational to trust it when it speaks on any matter, science included. In support of (2), he or she offers detailed arguments from hermeneutical theory, linguistics, comparative ancient Near Eastern studies, and so forth.

In the case just cited, such an individual would have reasons, perhaps good reasons, for believing that the general theory of evolution, in its current or recognizably future forms, is false and that creationism will be vindicated. As Laudan has argued from his studies in the history of science:

Thus, contrary to common belief, it can be rational to raise philosophical and religious objections against a particular theory or research tradition, if the latter runs counter to a well-established part of our general Weltbild—even if that Weltbild is not "scientific" (in the usual sense of the word).²⁵

Type Two. This type of external conceptual problem focuses on a scientific theory which, if taken as the whole of some phenomenon, undercuts a necessary precondition for science itself (understood in a realist way), and thus, makes the scientific theory self-referentially inconsistent. Even Darwin mused about why one ought to trust the deliverances of the mind if it were a mere product of a blind process of natural selection and survival…

A prominent example of this kind of external conceptual problem involves focusing on the nature of rationality itself. Even Darwin mused about why one ought to trust the deliverances of the mind if it were a mere product of a blind process of natural selection and survival, and recent thinkers like Stanley L. Jaki have echoed these sentiments.²⁶ A number of arguments have been associated with this type of problem, but they all cite some necessary feature of rationality itself which, it is argued, is incompatible with an evolutionary account of the origin and nature of our faculties.

Some of these features are as follows: the need for libertarian freedom to make sense out of rational obligation; an epistemological commitment to internalism and normative, nonnatural ideas of ration- the need for an enduring "I" and absolute identity through change to make sense out of rational inferences a mental faculty of intuition to be able to "see" the laws of logic; intentionality as an irreducibly mental property in order to have thoughts (beliefs, experiences! about the world; and an agent view of the self to account for episodes of purposeful or intentional action involved in reflection. The point is that these features presuppose (1) substance dualism (2) agent causation (3) faculties designed to be appropriate "truth gatherers" in one’s noetic environment, and not faculties shaped by survival value (in which case, inverted qualia and related problems indicate that systematic delusion is underdetermined vis a vis possession of truth so far as survival is concerned).

Again, the details of these and counter-arguments are not of primary importance here. Suffice it to say that if someone claims to be justified in the belief that evolutionary theory is inconsistent with the existence of rationality, including scientific rationality, then evolutionary theory could be faulted as being self-referentially inconsistent.

Type Three. The final type of external conceptual problem listed above is one in which evolutionary theory is logically consistent with some rational doctrine outside science, but the two are not mutually reinforcing, epistemically speaking, and one tends to count against the other.

The main example of this type of external conceptual problem is the existence of what might be called common sense, objectivist morality. Suppose someone believed the following:

1. Virtue theory coupled with a de-ontological view of ethical rules is part of an overall analysis of morality.
2. Moral statements are objectively true in terms of a correspondence theory of truth which, in turn, implies the existence on nonnatural moral properties.
3. Humans have intrinsic worth and dignity qua human beings in a way not shared by lower animals, which have lesser value and lesser moral rights.
4. Moral intuitionism is true and there must be a faculty of moral intuition for there to be moral knowledge.
5. Moral obligation presupposes libertarian freedom which, in turn, makes sense if substance dualism is true.

These comments illustrate the fact that one could claim that the common sense, objectivist moral view is true and rational, and that such a view is hard to square with an evolutionary account of the nature and origin of the cosmos, especially Homo sapiens.

Now, a number of thinkers have argued that this view of morality, while strictly consistent with an evolutionary naturalism, nonetheless is odd and is an unlikely "dangler," given evolutionary naturalism. For example, David Hull makes the following observation:

The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of "natures" to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolved in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo sapiens as a biological species. If Homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one’s claims about "human nature." Perhaps all people are "persons," share the same "personhood," etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin’s theory brought into question all these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate "Homo sapiens" from "human being," but the result is a much less plausible position.²⁷

George Mavrodes has argued that the existence of common sense, objectivist moral properties is queer and unlikely, given a naturalistic account of the world and human beings.²⁸ David Solomon has noted arguments to the effect that virtue theory makes sense against a backdrop of essentialism and a broadly teleological view of nature, especially human nature, and that such a backdrop is unlikely, given a modern scientific view of the nature and development of the cosmos, including man.²⁹ Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer claim that the common sense view of the intrinsic, special dignity of being human is guilty of an indefensible speciesism, and part of their argument is that this view is unreasonable in light of evolutionary theory.³⁰ These comments illustrate the fact that one could claim that the common sense, objectivist moral view is true and rational, and that such a view is hard to square with an evolutionary account of the nature and origin of the cosmos, especially Homo sapiens.

In sum, various types of internal and external problems have been part of scientific theory assessment throughout the history of science, and the same can be said for creationist and evolutionary theories. Science is not an airtight set of disciplines completely isolated from other fields, and problems which originate in other disciplines can enter into the very fabric of science itself as part of the assessment of a scientific theory.³¹ To claim this much is to simply observe the fact that other fields interact with science in various and complicated ways, and sometimes they become part of science itself.³² Creation science may fail to be science for some other reason, but not because of its attempt to pose and solve conceptual problems. For as we have seen, raising and solving such problems are parts of the legitimate business of science.

The second-order philosophical claim that versions of creationism, e.g. creation science, are not a science but religion simply because creationist theories utilize broad philosophical and theological concepts cannot be sustained. There is no widely accepted set of necessary and sufficient conditions which constitute a line of demarcation between science and nonscience/pseudoscience that can be used to place creation science in the latter camp. Further, by focusing on the nature and role of conceptual problems as part of the very practice of scientific explanation and confirmation, we see that creation science is an attempt to respond to those problems thought to be problematic for an evolutionary research program.

It would seem, then, that creationist theories like creation science cannot be labeled non-science or pseudo-science by simply citing the presence of philosophical, ethical, and theological conceptual issues within creationist theories. It may be that creationist theories, while scientific, are not as rationally acceptable as their evolutionary rivals. But that, of course, is a different matter altogether.³³

Endnotes

¹ Robert C. Cowen, "Science Is What Can Be Argued, Not What Is Believed," The Baltimore Sun, July 8, 1987, Section B, p. 8.

² Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley, 1982), p. 322.

³ Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended, p. 322. Cf David Hull’s review of Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial in Nature 352 (August 8, 1991) pp. 485-86.

⁴ John Weister, "Should Public Schools Teach Creation Science," Christianity Today 32 (September 18, 1987): p. 50.

⁵ Paul de Vries, "Naturalism in the Natural Sciences: A Christian Perspective," Christian Scholar’s Review 15 (1986): pp. 388-96; Howard J. Van TiU, Robert E. Snow, John H. Stek, Davis A. Young, Portraits of Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990); Howard J. Van Till, "When Faith and Reason Cooperate," Christian Scholar’s Review 21 (September 1991): pp. 33-45.

⁶ Thomas V. Morris, ed., Divine & Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 2-5.

⁷ As Philip Kitcher noted: "Moreover, variants of creationism were supported by a number of eminent nineteenth-century scientists ….These creationists trusted that their theories would accord with the Bible, interpreted in what they saw as a correct way. However, that fact does not affect the scientific status of those theories. Even postulating an unobserved Creator need be no more unscientific than postulating unobservable particles. What matters is the character of the proposals and the ways in which they are articulated and defended. The great scientific creationists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered problem-solving strategies for many of the questions addressed by evolutionary theory." See his Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 125.

⁸ Norman Geisler, The Creator in the Courtroom (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1982), p. 176.

⁹ Ernan McMullin,, "Introduction: Evolution and Creation," in Evolution and Creation, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p. 46, Larry Laudan, "Commentary: Science at the Bar—Causes for Concern," Science, Technology, and Human Values 7 (FaU 1982) pp. 16-19. Cf. Michael Ruse, ""Response to the Commentary: Pro Judice," Science, Technology, and Human Values 7 (FaU 1982) pp. 19-23; Larry Laudan, "More on Creationism," Science, Technology, and Human Values 8 (Winter 1983): pp. 36-38.

¹⁰ For a survey of different views of creation and God’s causal activity in creation/evolution discussions in the middle of the nineteenth century, see Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 19-40.

¹¹ It is sometimes objected that the idea of a grouping described as "kind" is religious and not scientific. But this is simply false. Just because "kind" occurs in the Bible does not mean that the term is any more religious than other terms that occur in the Bible, e.g. terms for mathematical numbers, cattle the sun, and so on. A better point would be to claim that "kind" is vague. But this, by itself, does not make "kind" a non-scientific term. Science often uses general, vague terms. Creationists do need to make their use of "kind" more precise, e.g. by giving it operational content, but when they do they will not transform a religious concept to a scientific one, but rather, a vague scientific concept into a more precise one.

¹² Cf. Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Problem solving is central for Laudan’s anti-realist approach to science. According to him the basic unit of scientific progress and rationality is the solved problem. Scientific rationality is defined in terms of scientific progress, and scientific progress is defined in terms of problem-solving effectiveness. Since I have realist leanings in the philosophy of science, I do not share Laudan’s overall approach to the nature and role of problems in science. But my differences with Laudan are not essential to my thesis, because I agree with his contention that conceptual problems have been and ought to be part of science.

¹³ JL Mackie, "Three Steps Towards Absolutism," in Space, Time, and Causality, ed. Richard Swinburne (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 3-22.

¹⁴ Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pp. 236-49

¹⁵ Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, 1985), pp. 55-68 157-232.

¹⁶ Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, Roger L. Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984), pp. 99-112.

¹⁷ Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 46.

¹⁸ William Lane Craig, "What Place, Then, For A Creator?: Hawking on God and Creation,"," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 49 (1990): 473-91.

19 Cf.. Hubert P. Yockey, "Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology 91 (1981): pp. 13-16; "A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology 67 (1977): pp. 377-98.

²⁰ E. Mayr, Populations, Species, and Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 4.

²¹ See Richard J. Connell, Substance and Modern Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).

²² See Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 21, D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 30. These statements show how conceptual problems can enter into the scientific evaluation of a theory: one man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.

²³ Cf. George Bealer, "The Philosophical Limits of Scientific Essentialism," in Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 1: Metaphysics, 1987, ed. James E. Tomberlin (Atascadero, Calif.:.: Ridgeview 1987), pp. 289-365.

²⁴ Cf. J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), pp. 15-42

²⁵ Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems, p. 124.

²⁶ Stanley L. Jaki, Angels, Apes, and Men (La Salle, III.: Sherwood Sugden, 1983), pp. 51-72.

27 David Hull, The Metaphysics of Evolution (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1989), pp. 74-75.

²⁸ George I. Mavrodes, "Religion and the Queerness of Morality," in Rationality, Religious Belief, & Moral Commitment. eds. Robert Audi, William J. Wainwright (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 213-226.

²⁹ David Solomon, "Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics," in Midwest Studies in Philosophy X111: Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, eds. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K Wettstein (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 430 431.

³⁰ Helga Kuhse, Peter Singer, Should The Baby Live? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 118-139.

³¹ lt may be thought that I have been guilty of an inconsistency in the following way. I have agreed that there is no line of demarcation between science and non-science and yet I have argued that we can recognize clear cases of science and dear examples where conceptual problems have been appropriate parts of scientific practice. But an inconsistency only follows from these claims if we adopt epistemological methodism, that is, roughly the idea that we cannot know or justifiably believe p unless we already have criteria for (1) how it is that we know or justifiably believe p in the first place and (2) how it is that we can know or justifiably believe that the case at hand can be classified as an example of p and not something else. However, I do not hold to epistemological methodism. I am a particularist, and I believe clear cases of science and of appropriate utilizations of conceptual problems can be recognized prior to any clear, general criteria. Indeed, it is the cases which serve as a court of appeal for competing criteria, not vice versa.

³² It is beside the point that some people believe that theistic evolution is a way to adjust evolutionary theory so as to accommodate some of these conceptual problems. Other thinkers believe that creationist theories are better alternatives than theistic evolution, all things being considered (e.g. Biblical exegesis, the demand for primary agent causality regarding the origin of the universe, first life, various basic kinds of life, and man). But even if they are wrong, the point here is that these conceptual problems illumine the scientific status of creation-science, not that creation-science is the best scientific theory available, though I believe that to be the case as well.

³³ I wish to thank Del Ratzsch and Steve Meyer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

The relationship between science and miracles contains many aspects that are worthy topics of study in their own right. Currently, however, there has been a growing and sometimes heated dialogue about the proper way to view the integration of science and theology. A major part of this dialogue is a debate between those who accept the idea that science must presuppose methodological naturalism and those who reject this notion.¹ The different camps in this dispute accept very different ways of viewing the nature of a direct, miraculous act of God and its relationship to the practice of science. Given the ideological importance of science in contemporary culture, it is not surprising to see naturalists claim that miracles, even if they happened, are totally outside the limits of scientific theory formation, explanation, and confirmation and, thus, are unscientific in this sense. For example, atheist philosopher Michael Ruse claims that "even if scientific creationism were totally successful in making its case as science, it would not yield a scientific explanation of origins. Rather, at most, it could prove that science shows that there can be no scientific explanation of origins." Elsewhere, Ruse asserts that "The Creationists believe the world started miraculously. But miracles lie outside of science, which by definition deals with the natural, the repeatable, that which is governed by law."² What I find surprising is the fact that a significant number of Christian intellectuals agree with this position.

Let us define theistic science as a viewpoint which includes a commitment to the following three propositions:³

1. God, conceived of as a personal, transcendent agent of great power and intelligence, through direct, immediate, primary agency and indirect, mediate, secondary causation created and designed the world for a purpose. He acted directly through immediate, primary agency in the course of its development at various times (including prehistory—history prior to the arrival of human beings).⁴
2. The commitment expressed in Proposition 1 can appropriately enter the very fabric of the practice of science and the use of scientific methodology.
3. One way this commitment can appropriately enter the practice of science is through various uses in scientific methodology of gaps in the natural world. These gaps are essential features of direct, immediate, primary divine agency properly understood.

The Christian intellectuals mentioned above reject theistic science because, among other things, it supposedly uses an inappropriate god-of-the-gaps strategy for doing science and integrating it with theology. Instead, science requires the adoption of methodological naturalism, the idea that science must study natural (physical) entities from a natural point of view and seek explanations for things in terms of natural events and laws that are part of the natural causal fabric of the spatio-temporal world. Thus, theological beliefs in general, and direct, immediate, miraculous acts of God lie outside science, properly understood. The proper way to integrate science and theology is to view them as noninteracting, complementary approaches to the same reality; as such, they adopt very different standpoints, ask and answer very different kinds of questions, involve different levels of description, employ very different cognitive attitudes (e.g., objectivity and logical neutrality in science, personal involvement and commitment in theology), and are constituted by very different language games. These different, authentic perspectives are incomplete and, therefore, must be integrated into a coherent whole. But, each level of description (e.g., the chemical vs. the theological) is complete at its own level, with no gaps at that level for other perspectives to fill, and with no possibility for direct competition, conflict, or mutual epistemic reinforcement.⁵

I do not agree with this perspective if it is taken as the total picture of science/theology integration. In my view, theistic science is a legitimate research program. I have defended my views elsewhere and cannot undertake here a general treatment of this controversy.⁶ Instead, I shall focus on Proposition 3 above and defend the idea that a certain understanding of agency theory shows that the complementarity view is inadequate and that libertarian, agent acts (human and, in some cases, divine) leave gaps in the causal fabric of the natural world that could play a role in the practice of science. In what follows, I will, first, state the complementarity view; second, explain libertarian agency in contrast to compatibilist models of action, and third, show why "gaps" are part of such agency and illustrate ways that such a model of agency for certain divine acts could be relevant to the practice of science.

The Complementarity View

Currently, the complementarity view enjoys wide popularity among both Christian and non-Christian intellectuals. Among its Christian proponents are D. M. Mackay,⁷ A. R. Peacocke,⁸ Richard Bube,⁹ Howard J. Van Till,¹⁰ Paul de Vries,¹¹ and David G. Myers.¹² While scholars differ about certain details of this approach, nevertheless, there is broad agreement among them regarding the following components.

The Nature of Science

The goal of natural science is to study the spatio-temporal natural world of matter and energy and seek natural explanations for the physical properties, behavior, and formative history of the physical universe. The very nature of natural science requires one to adopt methodological naturalism, the idea that explanations of phenomena are to be sought within the nonpersonal causal fabric of events and processes in the created order. For example, in describing how two charged electrodes separate hydrogen and oxygen gas when placed in water, the "God hypothesis" is both unnecessary and out of place. In general, an appeal to personal intentions or actions of an agent, especially a supernatural one, violates the methodological naturalism that constitutes proper scientific methodology. Methodological naturalism is unrelated to metaphysical naturalism (the view that the spatio-temporal world of physical entities open to scientific investigation is all there is) because philosophical theses about the existence, nature, and acts of God are beyond the limits of, and are complementary with, science.¹³

Reality: A Hierarchy of Systems

Standing in Part/Whole Relationships

In nature, wholes are often more than the additive sum of their parts. Reality consists in a hierarchy of different levels of systems or things that are parts of and give rise to wholes (systems or things) at higher levels of organization due to the complex interaction of the parts at lower levels. For example, ascending from bottom to top through the hierarchy we have the following: energy, subatomic entities, atoms, molecules, constituents of cells (e.g., organelles), cells, biological systems (e.g., the respiratory system), whole biological organisms, the psychological level, the sociological level, and the theological level. As one ascends, each new level does not exist because some new entity has been added "from the outside," but rather, because it emerges from the lower level due to the complex interaction of parts at that level. For example, psychological states emerge and supervene upon the brain and central nervous system when the latter reaches a certain level of complexity needed to generate such an emergence.¹⁴ There are different understandings of supervenience.¹⁵ However, a generally accepted understanding of it for properties runs as follows: Property P supervenes on property Q just in case (1) P and Q are completely distinct properties in that neither P nor Q enters the very being or constitution of the other; (2) P is ontologically dependent on and determined by Q; (3) the relationship between P and Q is nonreductive; (4) For any possible world in which some entity x exists, if x has Q then that is sufficient for its having P; there cannot be two entities alike in having Q but differing with respect to P. An entity cannot change in respect to P, cease to be P, or become more or less P without changing in respect to Q.

In this view, human persons are not genuine substances with natures, but rather, are property-things (ordered aggregates)—structured collections of externally related parts with emergent properties. To clarify this point, it will be helpful to step back for a moment and compare two different metaphysical positions about two very different kinds of wholes with parts: substances, understood in the classic interpretation of Aristotle and Aquinas, vs. property-things or ordered aggregates.¹⁶

According to the traditional view, living organisms, historically, were taken to be paradigm cases of substances. First, a substance is a thing which has or owns properties but is not had by something more basic than it. Secondly, a substance is a deep unity of parts, properties, and capacities at a point in time; it maintains absolute sameness through (accidental) change. Substances are wholes that are ontologically prior to their parts in that those parts are what they are in virtue of what the substance is, taken as a whole. For example, a chamber of a heart is defined in terms of the heart as a whole; the heart is defined in terms of the circulation system as a whole; and the circulation system is defined in terms of the organism as a whole. Thirdly, a substance is a this-such, i.e., an individuated member of its natural kind which, in turn, constitutes its essence. For example, two dogs are different, particular animals with the same nature. The unity and nature of a substance derive from its essence that which lies within it. Its parts (e.g., the nose and claws of a dog) stand in internal relationship to each other in that if a part is removed from its whole, it loses its identity with itself. As Aristotle said, a severed human hand is, strictly speaking, no longer human—a fact that will become evident in a few days.

Substances are wholes that are ontologically prior to their parts in that those parts are what they are in virtue of what the substance is, taken as a whole.

An artifact, like a table or automobile, is a paradigm case of a property-thing. Property-things derive their unity from an external ordering principle (either in the mind of a designer or from a law of nature) imposed from the outside on a set of parts to form the object. A property-thing is structured stuff, i.e., parts placed in some type of ordering relationship. In such wholes, the parts are prior to the whole; the whole contains some sort of structural property that supervenes upon those parts (it is defined in terms of the parts and the ordering relationship); the parts are related to each other by means of external relationships; they remain identical to themselves regardless of whether or not they are in the whole property-thing (e.g., a car door is still what it is when detached from a car); and property-things do not maintain strict identity through loss of old parts or properties and gain of new ones.

Regarding human persons in particular, philosophers widely agree that the following are inconsistent with the property-thing position but are easier to justify on the substance view (and, in fact, may have the substance view as a necessary condition): the absolute unity of a person at a time; the irreducibility of the first person perspective; the absolute sameness of a person through change; the organic unity of the human body and the distinctive, irreducible, species specific, law-like ways it changes through time; the irreducibility or uneliminability of literal biological function or, more generally, teleology; the metaphysical possibility (let alone the reality) of disembodied existence; libertarian freedom; and the existence of human nature as that which constitutes the unity of the class of all humans.l7 I am not arguing that the items on this list are real, though I take that to be the case. I do think, however, that one should think carefully about how the complementarity property-thing model of living organisms—more specifically, human persons—has difficulty allowing for these things to be the case. One should ask whether the complementarity view is intellectually worth the price of jettisoning these arguably real aspects of human persons. Here is the main issue: the complementarity view does not have the intellectual resources to allow for the precise type of unity necessary for these features of human persons to obtain and if they are, in fact, genuine, then the complementarity view’s response to reductionism is simply inadequate.

Interaction Between Levels

Each level in the hierarchy is capable of an exhaustive description at that level using only concepts, theories, or laws appropriate to that level. Such descriptions are complete with no gaps that need to be filled in by theories or laws referring to entities, properties,, or processes at higher levels. For example, when a person chooses to eat fruit (a good choice!), a complete description of that action can be given at each level (e.g., the atomic, the psychological). Each level of description is an authentic, though partial, perspective and the whole truth requires an appeal to all the levels of description that are complementary to each other. Moreover, it is interesting that the bottom level is the one studied by physicists. Lower levels are more basic and sustain higher levels in existence. Higher levels emerge upon and are determined by the entities and patterns of interaction at lower levels. If some story is true at a higher level, then some story must be true at a lower level but not vice versa.18 In general, some physical (e.g., neurophysiological) state is necessary for a higher level (e.g., mental) state to exist and when some specific physical state obtains, that is sufficient for the occurrence of the supervening (e.g., mental) state.

We have just noted the relationship among levels as far as sustaining something in existence is concerned. A closely related, but distinct, issue involves the relationship of causality between levels. Regarding causality, the first thing to note is this: events are what do the causing in the natural world, i.e., events cause other events to occur. For example, a brain event is the cause for a mental event. Secondly, a serious problem to be probed later involves the causal efficacy (and not the reduction) of higher levels of description, most important, the mental level.

In general, some physical (e.g, neurophysiological) state is necessary for a higher level (e.g., mental) state to exist and when some specific physical state obtains, that is sufficient for the occurrence of the supervening (e.g., mental) state.

Advocates of the complementarity view appear to be caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, it is hard to avoid treating higher levels of description as causally impotent epiphenomena that supervene upon lower level systems because each lowest level physical state is (1) complete at its own level of description and (2) sufficient for the emergence of the higher level state. As philosophers Kathleen Lennon and David Charles argue, the only way to accept a psychological level of causal descriptions and also hold "that physical explanation is complete, i.e., that all physically characterizable events are susceptible to explanation on terms of physically sufficient causes … is to accept [the] reduction [of the psychological to the physical].~l9 On the other hand, in spite of the apparent inconsistency in doing so, advocates of this view allow that when higher level entities emerge, then events at that level can cause events to occur at lower levels through feedback mechanisms and event-event causation. As Jaegwon Kim has shown, the problem here is that "downward causation prima facie implies the failure of causal closure at the lower level, and the in principle impossibility of a complete theory of the lower level phenomena in their own terms."20 The question here is not that such feedback occurs, but whether there is room within the complementarity view for its occurrence that does not have an air of ad hoc-ness about it.

Agency and Free Will

Later, I will clarify the difference between libertarian and compatibilist views of freedom and agency. But for now, it should be noted that the complementarity view eschews libertarian freedom and agency in favor of compatibilist models of freedom. An illustration may help us understand the complementarity view. Consider the act of raising one’s hand to vote. At the various levels of natural science, a complete account of such an act could be given in terms of biological systems, neurons, brain states, etc. These levels of description would be ignorant of the psychological level in the sense that they would be what they are, with or without the presence of the higher psychological level, and they would contain no reference to mental processes, events, properties, etc. But a complete, noninteracting account of the act could be given at a psychological level by appealing to the individual’s desire to vote, his belief that raising his hand would satisfy this desire, and his willingness to raise his hand. Personal agency and action fall completely outside natural science levels of description, complementary to the psychological level.

Divine Action and Creation’s Functional Integrity

If we set aside human history, especially salvation history in which God performed primary cause miraculous acts, like parting the Red Sea or raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, then a consistent picture of divine action in the natural world emerges from what has already been said. God is not to be seen as a direct, primary, causal agent who suspends or overrides the laws of nature (by acting in a way different from his normal, regular activity), creating a gap in the natural fabric. Rather, God is constantly active in each and every event that happens. God sustains natural processes in existence, and expresses his freedom to act by employing natural processes mediately as secondary causes to accomplish his purposes in the world.²¹ He works "in and through" the natural causal fabric, unfolds its potentialities according to deterministic or probabilistic laws of nature and he does so without leaving any causal gaps in lower level physical processes and systems. God is the ground of all causes and the ultimate cause of all things. Moreover, God’s acting in and through natural events can be understood as the meaning and purposive pattern that can be seen in the providential unfolding of those events. As Howard J. Van Till puts it, God has created the world with functional integrity:

By this term I mean to denote a created world that has no functional deficiencies, no gaps in its economy of the sort that would require God to act immediately, temporarily assuming the role of creature to perform functions within the economy of the created world that other creatures have not been equipped to perform.²²

God-of-the-Gaps

Advocates of the complementarity view have a disdain and loathing for what is called a god-of-the-gaps argument. According to many complementarians, this type of argument is an epistemically inappropriate strategy in which God only acts when there are gaps in nature; one appeals to God merely to fill gaps in our scientific knowledge of naturalistic mechanism; these gaps and the appeal to God just mentioned are used in apologetic, natural-theology arguments to support Christian theism; and God is manifest and proved only by the miraculous, by that which defies natural scientific explanation. This strategy is bad for at least two reasons. First, natural science is making these gaps increasingly rare and, thus, there is less need to believe in God if such a belief is justified solely or largely by the god-of-thegaps strategy. Secondly, this strategy is based on a faulty understanding of the integration of science and theology and the proper model of human and divine action as depicted in the complementarity model. In particular, the strategy fails because there simply are no such gaps in the natural world, given the views already presented in this section.

I have responded to this argument elsewhere, and I will address it later in this article.²³ The argument represents a caricature of advocates of theistic science who see gaps in the natural world due to direct acts of God which can, in principle, be relevant to scientific methodology. No advocate of theistic science claims that God only acts in the "gaps." God is constantly active in sustaining the world, in concurring with natural processes, and the like. But advocates of theistic science believe that there is a scientifically and epistemically relevent distinction between primary and secondary causality and that both types of actions are relevant to the task of integrating science and theology. Belief in such a gap (and an appeal to a primary causal act of God to explain it) should not merely be based on ignorance of a natural causal mechanism, but on positive theological, philosophical, or scientific arguments that would lead one to expect such a gap. While most advocates of theistic science do use such a strategy for positive apologetic purposes, such a purpose is not necessary for an advocate of theistic science. If apologetic purposes are part of a person’s employment of theistic science, then that person need not hold that the entire ground for justifying belief in God is the explanatory work that "the God hypothesis" does in explaining gaps. Thus, most critical discussions of god-of-the-gaps issues generate far more heat than light precisely because they represent a gross caricature of those who actually employ this strategy.

The real issue is this: if God acts as a primary causal agent distinct from his action as a secondary cause, does it follow that there will be miraculous gaps in the natural causal fabric that could, in principle, be relevant to scientific methodology? I believe that the answer is "Yes," and to see why, we now turn to the difference between libertarian and compatibilist views of freedom and agency. Because the natures of freedom and agency are so central to the reality of causal gaps and theistic science, I must go into some detail in describing these competing models.

Libertarian and Compatibilist Models of Agency

All Christians believe we have free will, but they differ about what free will is. We can define determinism as the view that for every event that happens, there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could have happened. Every event is caused or necessitated by prior factors such that given these prior factors, the event in question had to occur. Libertarians embrace free will and hold that determinism is incompatible with it. Compatibilists hold that freedom and determinism are compatible with each other and, thus, the truth of determinism does not eliminate freedom. As we will see, compatibilists have a different understanding of free will from the one embraced by libertarians and hard determinists.

General Comparison

1. Compatibilism. For compatibilists, if determinism is true, then every human action (e.g., raising one’s hand to vote) is causally required by events that obtained prior to the action, including events that existed before the person acting was born. That is, human actions are mere happenings, parts of causal chains of events leading up to them. Freedom properly understood, however, is compatible with determinism.

2. Libertarianism. Libertarians claim that the freedom necessary for responsible action is not compatible with determinism. Real freedom requires a type of control over one’s action—and, more important, over one’s will—such that, given a choice to do A (raise one’s hand and vote) or B (leave the room), nothing determines that either choice is made. Rather, the agent himself must simply exercise his own causal powers and will to do one alternative, say A (or have the power to refrain from willing to do something). When an agent wills A, he also could have willed B without anything else being different inside or outside of his being. He is the absolute originator of his own actions. When an agent acts freely, he is a first or unmoved mover; no event causes him to act. His desires, beliefs, etc. may influence his choice, but free acts are not caused by prior states in the agent.

Suppose we have person P that freely did some act e, say changing his thoughts or raising his arm. A more precise, initial characterization of libertarian freedom and agency can be given as follows:

1. P is a substance that had the power to cause e.
2. P exerted its power as a first mover (an uncaused cause of action) to cause e.
3. P had the ability to refrain from exerting its power to cause e.
4. P caused e for the sake of some final cause, R, which is the reason P caused e.

We can delve more deeply into compatibilist and libertarian accounts of freedom by looking at four areas central to an adequate theory of free will.

Four Areas of Comparison Between Compatibilism and Libertarianism

1. The Ability Condition. To have the freedom necessary for responsible agency, one must have the ability to choose differently from the way the agent actually does. Compatibilists and libertarians agree that a free choice is one where a person "can" will to do otherwise but differ about what this ability is. Compatibilists see this ability as a hypothetical ability. Roughly, this means that the agent would have done otherwise had some other condition obtained, e.g., had the agent desired to do so. We are free to will whatever we desire though our desires are themselves determined. Freedom is willing to act on your strongest preference.

Libertarians view hypothetical ability as a slight of hand and not sufficient for the freedom needed for responsible agency. For libertarians, the real is sue is not whether we are free to do what we want, but whether we are free to want in the first place. A free act is one in which the agent is the ultimate originating source of the act. Freedom requires that we have the categorical ability to act, or at least, to will to act. This means that if Smith freely does (or wills to do) A, he could have refrained from doing (or willing to do) A or he could have done (or willed to have done) B without any conditions whatsoever being different. No description of Smith’s desires, beliefs, character, or other things in his makeup and no description of the universe prior to and at the moment of his choice to do A is sufficient to entail that he did A. It was not necessary that anything be different for Smith to do B instead This means that there will be a gap in the universe just prior to and after a free act due to the causal activity of the agent as first mover.

Compatibilists* and libertarians agree that a free choice is one where a person "can" will to do otherwise but differ about what this ability is.

The libertarian notion of categorical ability includes a dual ability: if one has the ability to exert his power to do (or will to do) A, one also has the ability to refrain from exerting his power to do (or will to do) A. By contrast, the compatibilist notion of hypothetical ability is not a dual ability. Given a description of a person’s circumstances and internal states at time t, only one choice could obtain and the ability to refrain is not there; its presence depends on the hypothetical condition that the person had a desire (namely, to refrain from acting) which was not actually present. There is no causal gap just prior to and after the act of a substantial first mover who contributes causal power into the natural causal fabric because this view of agency is rejected by compatibilists.

2. The Control Condition. Suppose Jones raises his hand to vote. Compatibilists and libertarians agree that a necessary condition for the freedom of this act is that Jones must be in control of the act itself. However, they differ radically about what control is.

To understand compatibilist views of the control condition, recall that compatibilists take cause and effect to be characterized as a series of events making up causal chains with earlier events and the laws of nature (either deterministic or probabilistic) causing later events. The universe is what it is at the present moment because of the state of the universe at the moment before the present and the correct causal laws describing the universe. A crude example of such a causal chain would be a series of 100 dominos falling in sequence from the first domino on until domino 100 falls. Suppose all the dominos are black except numbers 40-50, which are green. Here we have a causal chain of events that progresses from domino one to 100 and that "runs through" the green dominos.

According to compatibilism, an act is free only if it is under the agent’s own control. And it is under the agent’s own control only if the causal chain of events—which extends back in time to events realized before the agent was even born—that caused the act Jones’s hand being raised) "runs through" the agent himself in the correct way. But what does it mean to say that the causal chain "runs through the agent in the correct way"? Here compatibilists differ from each other. But the basic idea is that an agent is in control of an act, just in case the act is caused in the right way by prior states of the agent himself (e.g., by the agent’s own character, beliefs, desires, and values). This idea is sometimes called a causal theory of action.

Libertarians reject the causal theory of action and the compatibilist notion of control and claim that a different sense of control is needed for freedom to exist. Consider a case where a staff moves a stone but is itself moved by a hand that is moved by c man. In Summa contra Gentiles I, Chap. 8, St. Thomas Aquinas states a principle about causal chains that is relevant to the type of control necessary for libertarian freedom:

In an ordered series of movers and things moved [to move is to change in some way], it is necessarily the fact that, when the first mover is removed or ceases to move, no other mover will move [another] or be [itself] moved. For the first mover is the cause of motion for all the others. But, if there are movers and things moved following an order to infinity there will be no first mover, but all would be as intermediate movers … [Now] that which moves [another] as an instrumental cause cannot [so] move unless there be a principal moving cause [a first cause, an unmoved mover].

Suppose we have nine stationary cars lined up bumper to bumper and a tenth car runs into the first car causing each to move the next vehicle until car nine on the end is moved. Suppose further that all the cars are black except cars 5 to 8 which are green. Now, what caused the ninth car to move?

According to Aquinas, cars 2 to 8 are not the real cause of motion for car 9. Why? Because they are only instrumental causes, each of these cars passively receives motion and transfers that motion to the next car in the series. Car 1 (actually, the driver of car 1) is the real cause since it is the first mover of the series. It is the source of motion for all the others. Only first movers are the sources of action, not instrumental movers that merely receive motion passively and pass that on to the next member in a causal chain.

Compatibilists and libertarians agree that a necessary condition for the freedom [to] act is that [a person] must be in control of the act itself. However, they differ radically about what control is.

For libertarians, it is only if agents are first causes, unmoved movers, that they have the control necessary for freedom. An agent must be the absolute, originating source of his own actions to be in control. If, as compatibilists picture it, an agent is just a theater through which a chain of instrumental causes passes, then there is no real control. Further, the control that an unmoved mover exercises in free action is a dual control—it is the power to exercise his own ability to act or to refrain from exercising his own ability to act.

3. The Rationality Condition. The rationality condition requires that an agent have a personal reason for acting before the act counts as a free one.24 Consider again the case of Jones raising his hand to vote. In order to understand the difference between the two schools about how to handle this case in light of the rationality condition, we need to draw a distinction between an efficient and a final cause. An efficient cause is that by means of which an effect is produced. One ball moving another is an example of efficient causality. By contrast, a final cause is that for the sake of which an effect is produced. Final causes are teleological goals, ends, or purposes for which an event is done; the event is a means to the end that is the final cause.

Now a compatibilist will explain Jones’ voting in terms of efficient and not final causes. According to this view, Jones had a desire to vote and a belief that raising his hand would satisfy this desire and this state of affairs in him (the belief/desire set composed

posed of the two items just mentioned) caused the state of affairs of his hand going up. In general, whenever some person S does A (raises his hand) to do B (vote), we can restate this as S does A (raises his hand) because he desired to B (vote) and believed that by A-ing (raising his hand), he would satisfy desire B. On this view, a reason for acting turns out to be a certain type of state in the agent, a belief-desire state, that is the real efficient cause of the action taking place. Persons as substances do not act; states within persons cause latter states to occur. The compatibilist, in possession of a clear way to explain cases where S does A to do B, challenges the libertarian to come up with an alternative explanation.

Many libertarians respond by saying that our reasons for acting are final and not efficient causes. Jones raises his hand in order to vote, or perhaps, to satisfy his desire to vote. In general, when person S does A to do B, B states the reason (e.g., a desire or a value) which is the teleological end or purpose for the sake of which S freely does A. Here the person acts as an unmoved mover by simply exercising his powers in raising his arm spontaneously. His beliefs and desires do not cause the arm to go up; he himself does. But B serves as a final cause or purpose for the sake of which A is done. Thus, compatibilists embrace a belief/desire psychology (states of beliefs and desires in the agent cause the action to take place), while at least many libertarians reject it and see a different role for beliefs and desires in free acts.

4. Causation. From what has already been said, we can anticipate a difference between libertarians and compatibilists about causation. For the compatibilist, the only type of causation is called eventevent causation. Suppose a brick breaks a glass. In general event-event causation can be defined in this way: an event of kind K (the moving of the brick and its touching of the surface of the glass) in circumstances of kind C (the glass being in a solid and not liquid state) occurring to an entity of kind E (the glass object itself) causes an event of kind Q (the breaking of the glass) to occur. Here, all causes and effects in the chain are events. If we say that a desire to vote caused Jones to raise his arm we are wrong. Strictly speaking, a desiring to vote caused a raising of the arm inside of Jones.

Libertarians agree that event-event causation is the correct way to account for normal events in the natural world, like bricks breaking glasses. But when it comes to the free acts of persons, the person, as a substance and an agent directly produces the effect. Persons are agents and, as such, in free acts they either cause their acts for the sake of reasons (called agent causation) or their acts are simply uncaused events they spontaneously do by exercising their powers for the sake of reasons (called a noncausal theory of agency). Either way, persons are seen as first causes, unmoved movers who have the power to exercise the ability to act as the ultimate originators of their actions. It is the I, the self that acts; not a state in the self that causes a moving of some kind. Libertarians claim that their view makes sense of the difference between actions (expressed by the active voice, e.g., Jones raised his hand to vote) and mere happenings (expressed by the passive voice, e.g., a raising of the hand was caused by a desiring to vote, which was caused by x, …).

For the compatibilist, the only type of causation is called event-event causation…. [For the Libertarian,] when it comes to the free acts of persons, the person, as a substance and an agent, directly produces the effect.

At this point it may be helpful to discuss the relevance of quantum physics to the free will debate. According to some, certain quantum events (e.g., the precise location of an electron hitting a plate after being shot through a slit, the exact time a specific atom of uranium will decay into lead) are completely uncaused events and, as such, are indeterminate, random happenings. Thus, it is argued, a quantum view of reality abandons determinism and makes room for freedom. As chemist Michael Kellman puts it, " … the theory of quantum mechanics … is compatible with a role for mind as agent in determining some actions of purely material portions of biological systems."²⁵

Unfortunately, quantum physics has little relevance to the free will debate. For one thing, many scientists believe that the quantum world is just as determined as the regular world of macro-objects, like baseballs and cars. We just do not (perhaps cannot) know what the causes are for some events and we cannot predict exactly the precise behavior of quantum entities. For another thing, even if we grant that the quantum world is really a place where determinism is false, it could still be argued that determinism reigns in the macro world. More important, a necessary condition of libertarian freedom is a view of the person as a substance that acts as an agent, i.e., as a first cause or an unmoved mover. Thus, determinism is sufficient for a denial of libertarian freedom, since it says that all events are caused by prior events and there are no substantial agents that act as unmoved movers. But determinism is not necessary to deny such freedom. Completely uncaused events that randomly occur without reason (as in the quantum world) do not give the type of agency needed for libertarian freedom either. The main debate between compatibilists and libertarians is one about the nature of agency and not determinism per se, although the truth of determinism is sufficient for the denial of libertarianism as was already mentioned.

With this in mind, we can modify the understanding of modern compatibilism we have used up to this point. Compatibilism is basically the thesis that freedom and determinism are compatible with each other, i.e., that both can be true. But some, indeed, most compatibilists go on to accept the truth of determinism, while others do not make a commitment to accepting determinism. However, both groups of compatibilists reject libertarian agency. So while we will continue to focus on the majority of compatibilists who accept determinism, we need to remember that the nature of agency, and not determinism per se, is the main disagreement between compatibilists and libertarians. Next let us apply these insights about agency to questions regarding miracles, gaps, and theistic science.²⁶

Miracles, Agent Gaps, and Science

Complementarian A. R. Peacocke has said that the "problem of the human sense of being an agent … acting in this physical causal nexus, is of the same ilk as the relationship of God to the world."²⁷ I agree. But whereas Peacocke uses this point to support the complementarian view and place miracles outside the bounds of science, I claim that the analogy between human and divine action actually supports theistic science and the possibility of miraculous acts being part of science. The difference between us is this: Peacocke and complementarian methodological naturalists in general adopt compatibilist models of (divine and human) action (at least for causality outside of salvation history) with the result that no gaps exist in the causal fabric. I see (divine and human) action in terms of libertarian agency and believe that free acts leave scientifically detectable gaps in the natural world.

To see why complementarian compatibilists have no room for gaps, consider the following statements from naturalist philosophers. John Searle has said that "our conception of physical reality simply does not allow for radical [libertarian] freedom."²⁸ The reason for this is that once you claim that the physical level of description is both basic and complete, you rule out the possibility of top-down feedback. As naturalist David Papineau has argued:

I take it that physics, unlike the other special sciences, is complete, in the sense that all physical events are determined or have their chances determined, by prior physical events according to physical laws. In other words, we never need to look beyond the realm of the physical in order to identify a set of antecedents which fixes the chances of subsequent physical occurrence. A purely physical specification, plus physical laws, will always suffice to tell us what is physically going to happen, insofar as that can be foretold at all.²⁹

Jaegwon Kim says that someone who holds that the physical level is basic and complete must "accept some form of the principle that the physical domain is causally closed—that if a physical phenomenon is causally explainable, it must have an explanation within the physical domain."³⁰ Here is the reason for the remarks by Searle, Papineau, and Kim. In every alleged case where there is a description of top-down causation (e.g., where a state of intending to raise my arm causes the raising of the arm), there will be a corresponding description of a causal sequence of events that run along the bottom level (e.g., there will be a physical state "associated with" the mental state of intending to raise one’s arm and a physical state "associated with" each moment of the arm being raised).

Moreover, when we claim that the physical is the bottom level, this means not just that each upper level event has some lower level event or another correlated with it. It means that the description of the bottom level sequence of events is complete without any gaps. For example, at each moment during the process of voting—I desire to vote, believe that raising my arm will satisfy that desire deliberate about whether to vote, will to raise my arm, and raise it—throughout a time of a few seconds, there will be a physical state in my brain and nervous system that is sufficient to produce the next physical state without room for feedback. Remember, the physical level description is complete and basic. There is no room for mental entities to make a physical difference in the world because once the physical antecedents are fixed, so are the physical consequences (or at least their probabilities). This is simply what it means to claim that the physical is both basic and complete at its own level of description. Moreover, each alleged description of a top-down causal connection will have a description that runs the other way and that is more consistent with the view that the physical level is at the bottom. In any case, even if one allows for top-down mental-to-physical feedback, this type of causality will still be event-event causation with no room for libertarian agency.

Complementarian methodological naturalists in general adopt compatibilist model s of… action… with the result that no gaps exist in the causal fabric. I see . . . action in terms of libertarian agency and believe that free acts leave scientifically detectable gaps in the natural world.

By contrast, in cases of libertarian action, say, just before one acts to raise one’s arm and during the raising of it, the description of one’s brain and central nervous system just before acting will not be sufficient to entail or causally account for the physical description resulting from the agent’s own (first mover) exercise of causal power. Of course, at each moment there will be some physical state, but the events at the physical level will not form a continuous chain of causal events. Instead, there will be a causal gap due to the action of the agent. This is why some have objected to libertarian agency since libertarian acts violate the first law of the conservation of energy. I think such acts do indeed violate the first law and, in fact, this is part of what it means for an agent to be in the image of God—he or she is capable of genuine creativity and novelty. Moreover, Robert Larmer argues that we must distinguish two forms of the First Law. A strong form states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. A weak form states that in a causally closed system, the total amount of energy remains constant. Larmer says that libertarian agency is inconsistent with the strong, but not the weak, form because the human body is not a causally closed physical system.³¹ He correctly sees that libertarian acts leave gaps in the natural causal fabric.

If we assume for a moment that libertarian agency is the correct model of divine action for primary causal miracles, then whenever God acts in this way, there will be a gap in the natural world that could figure into scientific practice in at least three ways. First, scientific methodology includes the psychology of discovery, roughly, the psychological processes scientists go through to come up with theories to guide their research. Now it is a known fact that in the history of science, a hypothesis often has suggested itself to a scientist from his theological or metaphysical beliefs. If someone held that various things in the natural world were the result of a libertarian, miraculous act of God (e.g., the beginning of the universe, the direct creation of first life and the various kinds of life, the direct creation of human beings in the Mid-East, the flood of Noah), then such a belief could guide a scientist in postulating that there will be no natural explanation for the occurrence of these things. This could, in turn, lead him or her to try to discover evidence for these events (the flood of Noah, a Mid-Eastern origin for human beings) or to try to falsify the fact that they were the result of miraculous acts by trying to discover natural mechanisms for their occurrence that he or she believes are not there.

Secondly, in a number of areas of science (forensic science, SETI, archeology, psychology), scientific explanations for some phenomenon appeal to the desires, beliefs, intentions, and actions of personal agents. Thus, for example, if one discovered that living systems are discontinuous with nonliving systems in such a way that living systems bear certain features that usually result from personal agency (e.g., information in DNA, different kinds of design such as beauty, order, etc.), and if one has grounds for thinking that it is improbable that a naturalist mechanism will be found to account for this, then one could legitimately see the origin of life as a gap in the history of the universe due to a primary causal act of God. In this case, an appeal to divine action, intentions, and so forth could be a legitimate form of scientific explanation

Thirdly, these features of living systems could lend some confirmation to the hypothesis that life was, indeed, the result of a miraculous act of God. Such claims would be defeasible (i.e., they could be shown false given more data), but this is irrelevant since all scientific theories are (in principle) defeasible. Yet they are often well enough attested to be rationally accepted. In these three ways—scientific discovery, scientific explanation that is a form of personal explanation, and scientific confirmation—gaps in the causal fabric derived from theological models of primary causal divine agency regarding some natural phenomenon could enter into scientific methodology.[32]

Conclusion

In this article, I have not had the space to defend libertarian agency for human or divine (primary causal) action, though I obviously think such a defense is possible. Fortunately, such a defense is not needed for my purposes here. I have tried to show that the claim that miracles are in principle outside the bounds of science is one embedded in a backdrop that includes a complementarian, methodological, naturalist view of science and reality, along with a compatibilist view of human and divine action in the natural world (outside salvation history). This, in turn, has lead many to reject any version of a theistic explanation for gaps because, among other things, the backdrop just mentioned denies that such gaps exist.

Whether miracles are outside the bounds of science, then, depends in part on one’s model of divine agency…

By contrast, I do not limit the use of theistic science to the employment of explanations that appeal to direct, primary causal acts of God. Nevertheless, if such acts have occurred in certain cases, and if libertarian agency is a good model for depicting such actions, then there will be gaps in the causal fabric that can enter scientific practice. Whether miracles are outside the bounds of science, then, depends in part on one’s model of divine agency which, in turn, can be understood from an analogy with human action. Complementarians may, unfortunately, reject libertarian agency, but even if they do, I hope to have made clear why some of us who accept this model believe that miracles can, in fact, be part of scientific practice.

Endnotes

¹ Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (Addison-Wesley, 1982,. [up]

² Ibid. [up]

³ Nothing honorific is meant by the term "theistic science." More precisely, it is not meant to imply that methodological naturalists are not solid Christian theists. The term is currently being used to label a view bearing a family resemblance to the definition I offer here. No emotional connotations should be derived from the label. [up]

⁴ It has been argued that Proposition 1 assumes that we know God has directly acted in the world from insights about what a creator would do and that we should, instead, exhaust every possible natural process for God’s activity before concluding we have a primary cause. Three things are wrong with this suggestion. First, any statement of a theory or research program contains assertions in the indicative mood, and such propositions do not imply anything whatever about commitment to the truth of those propositions or the epistemic strength of such commitment. One can use a theory to explore the natural world even if one wishes to falsify the theory. The presence of 1 does not imply that anyone holds the assumption in question, much less that someone knows it to be true. Second, even if one believes proposition 1 to be true, why can’t this believe rest, in part, on prior theological or philosophical arguments. I see no reason to think that one must exhaust every possible naturalistic explanation before one is justified in believing 1. Even in science, a theory can receive some initial epistemic support from so-called non-empirical factors (elegance, simplicity, internal clarity, harmony with external conceptual problems), so such a prior commitment does not violate the nature of science. Third, many advocates of theistic science believe that we have, in fact, exhausted enough naturalistic possibilities to justify the defeasible commitment to a primary causal divine act for things like the origin of life or human beings. [up]

⁵ Richard Bube has complained that my characterization of complementarity is confused and is actually a description of what he calls compartmentalization. See his Putting It All Together (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 168. Cf. chapters 6 and 10. For Bube, compartmentalization treats science and theology as different descriptions about different kinds of things with no common ground or possibility of conflict. Complementarity views science and theology as different descriptions of the same reality. Unfortunately, Bube is simply wrong in this complaint toward my position. What he calls compartmentalization is close to what I call the "two realms" view of integration and my description of complementarity is an accurate one. The source of Bube’s confusion is revealing. I claim that the complementarity view eschews interaction between science and theology and Bube says that it embraces such interaction. However, Bube equivocates on what "interaction’ means in this context. For me, it is "epistemic" interaction, roughly the same description of the same reality that can be in conflict or concord to varying degrees of strength. For Bube, interaction amounts to taking two different (noninteracting in my sense) perspectives and forming them into a whole. For example, a completely scientific description of the origin of life in natural terms could be described in theological terms as God’s activity in bringing life into being. It is clear that his notion of interaction is not the one I deny in explicating complementarity. Moreover, my use of interaction is crucial in understanding the significance for scientific methodology of gaps in the natural causal fabric due to libertarian agency and primary causal activity on God’s part. [up]

⁶ See J. P. Moreland, ed., The Creation Hypothesis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), chapters 1,2; "Creation Science and Methodological Naturalism," in Man and Creation, ed. by Michael Bauman (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 1993), 105-139; Christianity and the Nature of Science (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), chapters 1, 6; "Conceptual Problems and the Scientific Status of Creation Science," Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 46 (March 1994): 2-13. [up]

⁷ See D. M. Mackay, The Clock Work Image (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1974); Human Science & Human Dignity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 26-56.

⁸ See A. R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 112-46; God and the New Biology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986).

⁹ See Richard Bube, The Human Quest (Waco: Word Books 1971), 26-35, 134-59; Richard Bube, ed., The Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968),17-108; Putting It All Together, Chapter 10.

¹⁰ See Howard J. Van Till, "The Character of Contemporary Natural Science," in Portraits of Creation, ed. by Howard J. Van Till, Robert E. Snow, John H. Stek, and Davis A. Young (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 126-65; Howard J. Van Till, Davis A. Young, Clarence Menninga, Science Held Hostage (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988) Howard J. Van Till, "Categorical Complementarity and the Creationomic Perspective," Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 37 (September 1985): 149-57.

¹¹ Paul de Vries, "Naturalism in the Natural Sciences: A Christian Perspective," Christian Scholar’s Review 15 (1986): 388-96.

¹² David G. Myers, The Human Puzzle (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 3-22, 45-90, 201-31.

¹³ Howard J. Van Till has complained that my description of methodological naturalism treats it as a scientific strategy that begins with philosophical naturalism, strips away all reference to atheistic metaphysics, and leaves room only for methodological rules that proscribe consideration of divine action. According to Van Till, this is a caricature. See "Special Creationism in Designers Clothing: A Response to The Creation Hypothesis" in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 47 (June 1995): 126-27. It should be clear, however, that I have done no such thing. I acknowledge that Van Till and others distinguish philosophical from methodological naturalism. The point is that for Van Till, theological notions like primary causal acts of God do not play a role within the methodology of science. If Van Till thinks that this is a caricature, then he needs to point out where this description is wrong and state where theological concepts have a role within scientific methodology in his view.

¹⁴ Advocates of the complementarity view differ in the details here and, in some cases, appear to be confused. Early on Peacocke advocated what is called type type identity physicalism regarding the mental, Bube seems to embrace property dualism, and Mackay appears to conflate a double aspect, a type-type identity, and a functionalist view of the mind/body problem. On Mackay, see Human Science & Human Dignity, 26-34. See J. Kim, "Supervenience," in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. by Hans Burkhardt, Barry Smith (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1991): II, 877-879.

¹⁶ For more on this see Richard Connell, Substance and Modern Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). There are other uses of the term "substance" that I shall not consider here because they are not relevant to the line of critique I am developing. It should be pointed out, however, that the classic definition of substance is not an arbitrary construction of philosophers’ fancy. It is rooted in reality as Connell’s book points out.

¹⁷ There are also significant implications of the property-thing view for end of life ethics. See J. P. Moreland, "Humanness, Personhood, and the Right to Die," Faith and Philosophy (Jan. 1995): 95-112; J. P. Moreland, Stan Wallace, "Aquinas, Locke and Descartes on the Human Person and End-of-Life Ethics," International Philosophical Quarterly 35 (Sept.1995): 319-30.

¹⁸ Mackay, Human Science & Human Dignity, 28. David Charles, Kathleen Lennon, eds., Reduction, Explanation, and Realism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 3-4.

²⁰ Jaegwon Kim, "Mental Causation in Searle’s Biological Naturalism," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (March 1995): 185-6.

²¹ I set aside debates about the exact nature of secondary causality (e.g. disputes over occasionalism and alternative accounts) because the distinction between primary and secondary causality will still be functionally and epistemologically significant irrespective of the exact nature of the metaphysical account of the difference between them because whatever else one wants to say here, secondary causality will be God’s usual way of acting and the laws of nature will be regular and normal here (regardless of whether they are deterministic or probabilistic)) and primary causality will be God’s unusual way of acting that could be epistemically detected due to the contrast in this type of action compared to the regular, usual sequences of events that constitute secondary causality.

²² Howard J. Van Till, "When Faith and Reason Cooperate," Christian Scholar’s Review 20 (September 1991): 42.

²³ cf J. P. Moreland, The Creation Hypothesis, 59-60.

²⁴ Some libertarians allow for the existence of free acts that are not done for any reason at all, e.g., freely moving my hand back and forth or looking at one thing and then another (where these acts are not caused by, say, a nervous twitch or a sudden noise). Spontaneity is the name for non-rational, bare exercises of free will. But there libertarians agree with the fact that a crucial class of human actions are those done for certain reasons, so there is still an important area of debate between libertarians and compatibilists about the role of reason in free choices. Liberty is the name for this class of cases of free will.

²⁵ Michael Kellman, "Science and Free Will," First Things (May 1994): 5

During the last decade or so, there has been a growing body of literature about various topics in end-of-life ethics. And while there is no clear agreement about a number of issues in this literature, nevertheless, there is something of a consensus that has emerged, perhaps unconsciously and implicitly at times, regarding how to view a cluster of crucial metaphysical themes relevant to the ethical issues just mentioned — the nature of personhood, humanness, and personal identity. In our view, this consensus approach to these three themes is Cartesian and Lockean in spirit. Often conspicuous by its absence, especially outside Catholic circles, is any discussion of Thomistic insights into these metaphysical desiderata, much less an acceptance of them. This tendency is egregious and contributes to a way of framing certain ethical issues that determines their resolution from the beginning.